I
tutor throughout the day. When I first started, teachers recommended students
to me that needed a bit more help in reading. I took these students, tested
each of them, and selected thirteen. Most read at a pre-school or kindergarten
level. Three of my students couldn’t read at all. They are all over the age of
ten.
Lately,
however, I’ve been working particularly hard with one of these three
students—Oddie. We’ve been following along a modified Montessori-model.
Essentially, we first worked on rhyming sounds to understand that different
letters make different sounds and same letters make the same sounds. From
there, we’ve moved on to learning individual phonics. Montessori recommends
learning phonics sounds in groups and not in alphabetical order. We have now
worked our way through the letters M, S, A, T; B, F, O, X; W, I, J, L; and G,
C, U, P. Oddie can identify each of the phonic sounds for these letters,
including long and short vowel sounds.
This
is vastly different from my other students, where we have followed a more
alphabetized model for phonics sounds. Most of them still struggle with the
vowel sounds and some of the more uncommon letters (X, Y, V, both sounds of G,
W, Q to name a few). More importantly, they may be able to identify the sound of
“I” when I show them the letter, but are unable to produce the sound when
reading words. Sounding out words phonetically is incredibly hard for most of
the kids and while they theoretically know that the letter “I” sounds like /i/,
they forget it while reading. Instead they’ll replace it with /e/ or /u/ or
make up a word entirely.
At
the end of the day, however, they’re at a different level. They can read basic
books and they know some sight words. They came to tutoring already recognizing
almost all of the letters of the alphabet and knowing some of the sounds for
the letters. Oddie didn’t come with that base knowledge.
But,
he has progressed rapidly with the sets of letters I’ve given him, and we have
reached the point where he has read a book! He’s read two, actually. And it can
be slow at times and I’ll have to help, but he can sound out words. The first
book we read, he had to sound out the word “is” every single time. He struggled
with the sound for “I” for a long time, so every time we reached a word with “I”
in it we had to stop and work through the different sounds. He still does that,
but I don’t have to prompt him to think about the sounds (“What sounds do “I”
make?”) and he remembers all of the sounds himself without my help. And the
word “is” has become a sight word that we can just move right along with while
reading.
This
may seem like a small matter—what 11-year-old, English-speaking boy can’t
recognize the word “is?”—but it’s an astronomical difference from where we were
nine months ago. I’d certainly like to take all the credit (and if you ask JVC,
I’m solely responsible) but I highly doubt that my efforts are the only factor
contributing to Oddie’s recent success.
For
some time, he’s been highly motivated to read. While we were working through
rhyming words, he kept asking me “when can I read a book?” and was frustrated
when I would hold him back. He wants to learn, so he is pushing himself to move
quicker.
And
therein lays the main difference between him and most of my students. Most of
them hate school. They hate it because it’s difficult and because they never
learned to read and are now in middle school and school is much harder at this
stage (especially when you can’t read). They hate it because they can’t focus
(and they can’t focus because they have undiagnosed PTSD or ADHD). They hate it
because they get yelled at and beat at home, and then they come to school and
it’s much of the same. They hate it because everyone sees them as bad kids and
treat them as such.
But
they hate school, and that has made them hate learning and hate reading. But
Oddie doesn’t hate school, in part, because he’s not in the “bad boy crew.” He
doesn’t often get into fights or trouble, and for the most part, he’s a pretty
good kid. This makes school more pleasant. But he does see his peers advancing,
and recognizes that he isn’t going as fast as them. He wants to be where his
peers are. He wants to read.
So
it’s slow, but it’s not as slow as it can be. And I teach, but it’s Oddie’s own
desire to get better that is getting him to read.
