Learning to Read

For the last month or so, we've been concentrating on teaching Maia to read. She's a very bright little girl, but she's behind her classmates in language. No wonder. She spent her first two years learning Kazakh, a hugely different language, with limited direct instruction.

Still, I think it's a mystery to her as to why she can't speak as well as her classmates. She knows she's smart, and I imagine she must wonder why there's that difference.


The other night, she wanted to know how "kitty" is spelled. So I spelled it out for her on this dry erase board I had picked up.

"Too many Ts," she said.

"No, Maia," I explained. "There are two Ts." And I showed her how one T was the end of the first sound, and the next T was the start of the next sound. Drew little brackets underneath the syllables and everything.

She listened to me patiently, and then very deliberately erased the offending T.

That's a pic of her handiwork at the top.

While I'm at it, I'll post another pic, one that shows her imagination.

This is from last year, at our old house. She was just a little past 3.

She had been drawing--it was this great efflorescence of color on the page.

"What's that," I had wanted to know.

"A fire," she said. "Where fire truck?" she said, and she ran off to look for it. But she couldn't find it.

So she came back and said, "Draw one."

"Draw a fire truck?"

"Yes," she said.

"To put out the fire?"

"Yes," she said.

So I drew one to put out the fire.







John, 5/16/2006