Reading?!
Forget reading-readiness, can’t we wait for Mommy-readiness?
So yesterday we had a cousin-play-day and I mentioned to Aunt Barbara that we were contemplating stopping at the “Z-O-O” on our vacation. Hans looked at me, puzzled something out in his head and then said, “Zoo?! We are going to go to the zoo!”
Surely, I thought, he must have visualized the letters I said and perhaps recognized it in the context of one of his picture books? Curious George has ‘zoo’ in several of the books. Still, visualizing the word is pretty impressive, but I was convinced he could not have sounded it out and made the word, especially doing it all in his head without seeing the letters (something I often have a hard time doing!).
So I told Daddy the story at dinner time and Daddy grinned and said, “So, Hans, what does C-U-P spell?” or some such word. I waited a day to regale you all and now I cannot remember the specifics. The point being that Hans sounded out and blended two words that his father asked of him without seeing the letters and without any context for the word.
I was absolutely incredulous.
So after dinner I pulled out a beginning reader and asked Hans to read it. The only thing that prevented him was that he didn’t know all the sounds of the letters (Yeah, see, we haven’t really been doing any preschool at all). As soon as I gave him the right sound, he could blend and make the word. So, it was pretty obvious to me that it was only my lack of instruction that was holding him back.
Don’t you know that I am on-board with the gentle, delayed, hands-off philosophy of preschool and kindergarten in order to justify procrastination?! I am a philosophical procrastinator — my philosophy justifies my procrastination. But now I find that I phrased my philosophy wrongly. I said, “I won’t begin real instruction or school times until Hans is ready for it. I’m not going to push reading. He will begin reading when he’s ready and as long as that’s before 7, we won’t really work at it until he’s started doing it himself.” And he’s starting to do it himself! He is meeting my criteria for “school-readiness.” I don’t want to do school yet! I want to read books about education and make lists and think about how nice it will be to have a routine out of necessity — but I don’t want that routine to be necessary NOW.
Yikes.
Can I at least wait until September? What other excuses can I find now?
And right now Hans is sitting at the table “doing math,” of his own volition: writing the numbers that are on a clock. And he can’t see any clock where he is sitting, or any numbers at all, but he is doing it.
So now is the time I regret that I cannot become philosophically an unschooler. Delayed, gentle, readiness-waiting, yes, I am. Unschooler I cannot be. Rats. Now I have to do something with this kid. :)
