Oddie Read a Book

                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.