ON HIS OWN TERMS: OBSERVING A YOUNG READER

I asked my almost 7-year old grandson, Nate, to read aloud to me. He did not want to. I thought, well, maybe he would like to write a story and read that to me. So, I folded and stapled some sheets of paper together to make a "book." Nate started copying, all on his own, from a little book he had chosen for us to read. As he copied the words from the book to a page in his book, he said the words out loud, phonetically, and also spelled them aloud as he wrote. He left spaces to copy the book's illustrations on each page. Nate's natural method combines copying, speaking, writing, reading, and drawing, all in one integrated motion. It gives the child a lovely lot of work to do, with no pressure. Nate invented this method of COPYING/SPEAKING/READING/WRITING/DRAWING. I recommend it. It takes all the pressure off the child to invent a story and write about it if he is not ready to do this. The pressure to read and write too young, especially in connection with boys, is back-firing. Nate showed his granny how to do this at child-speed-and-way.