Of course we respond to that mischievous cat.
That wild and crazy Cat in the Hat,
with his antics, insanity, tricks and all that.
We are children when we first read The Cat in the Hat and those are the things we wish we could do, if mommy and daddy wouldn’t put us in time out for it. The fact that this author identified with the damn fish is all too obvious, considering he analyses this book with the idea that the mother is a philandering children’s welfare case at best. I feel like, perhaps, he wasn’t breast fed enough as a child, or has some repressed angst about his own childhood. His brazen harshness slightly offends me, but it isn’t surprising in the least considering his “fish” affinity.
All of that aside, the idea that children learn by phonics is much more agreeable and obvious. When I was first learning how to read, I was one of the lucky children who was blessed with a want to read. I loved it. It was a way for me to jump into worlds and planes of existence that I wanted, so badly, to be real. I had an imagination to stop the world and, even when I had to read in school, I would find books and such to read outside of the usual homework. That is what worked for me. Constant practice and education at school and at home. My grandfather would sit down with me at the dinner table and chose a word out of the dictionary, teach me how to pronounce it, and explain what it meant in terms I could understand. I always had new and exciting words in my vocabulary that made me feel smart and accomplished.
What I do understand, unfortunately, is that not everyone has that opportunity, nor does everyone enjoy reading. My brother, for instance, didn’t have my grandfather around as much as I did due to his increasing illness. Not to mention he simply didn’t enjoy reading. He would have much rather gone outside and played hide and seek or climb trees. Don’t get me wrong, I loved playing with the neighborhood kids as much as the next tom boy, but I was the one who climbed the tree, book in toe, to sit on a limb and read about the most recent development in my favorite series.
My point is reading takes practice. Lots and lots of practice. Not necessarily memorization, but just as with anything else, practice makes perfect and too many children don’t get the kind of constant practice they need. No matter what books they are, if you keep reading them, eventually, you get really good at it.
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Why do we teach kids with books different from those we read ourselves? Why don't we teach children on the newspaper?
ReplyDeleteMuch like yourself, I always loved to read. However, right at the same time that other children were learning to read, I was learning how to speak English. This language barrier made learning to read all the more difficult, although now when I look back, I truly do believe that what helped my progress was my ability to sound out words and take advantage of phonetics. I had a very difficult time with words that contained letters which did not make sense to me (such as why elephant is spelled with a 'ph' as opposed to an 'f'.) To this day, I remember that when I first starteed reading, I took the greatest pleasure in reading "Cat in the Hat" simply because that was one of the few books where I could literally sound out every word and not have to worry about any "exception to the rule".
ReplyDeleteAll in all, however, I believe that my love of the written word came from constantly reading book after book and my parents' push to continue reading a book even when certain words would get me frustrated.
Stephen, is that a serious question? Let me guess, you don't have any kids. Well, I don't either but I can't think of a single book that I have read over the last decade that I would teach my kids to read with because they would probably not want to read it. What sort of books would you teach your kids to read with? I don't think a newspaper always has content that is appropriate or would be considered fun for a child. What are you trying to do? Turn kids off to reading all together. I think you have to let their minds develop into what they might consider to be something of interest to them that they might want to read, but that's just me. Maybe you've forgotten what it was like when you were a kid but didn't the colorful illustrations capture your imagination and didn't trying to sound out the words until you pronounced them correctly and committed it to memory give you a sense of accomplishment. You would really want to take that away from a kid? They have plenty of time to get to where we are my man!
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