School of Dad, Part 2: The Reading Problem

Ellie is not reading at the rate her school expected. She is five. She is brilliant, curious, funny, and physically fearless. She knows the names of approximately forty dinosaurs and can explain in reasonable detail why the asteroid theory of extinction is not the whole story. She has, however, been slow to decode text, and this has produced a gentle but consistent communication from her teacher about "where she needs to be" by the end of the year.

I have been trying, with mixed success, to respond to this like a rational adult.

The gap between knowing something intellectually and feeling it

I know that reading development has a wide normal range. I know that many children who are late readers go on to be excellent readers, and that early reading speed has limited predictive value for later academic performance, and that the pressure many schools apply to early literacy is partly driven by inspection frameworks rather than developmental evidence. I know all of this because I researched it, because that is what I do with things that are making me anxious.

Knowing it does not entirely stop the 4am version of the thing from running the unhelpful calculation: what if she struggles, what if this is the beginning of something, what if I am not doing enough.

The 4am version is not interested in the wide normal range.

What we tried that did not work

Reading logs. Ellie's school sends home a reading record book. We are supposed to read with her each evening and note it. We do read with her each evening. The noting became, within three weeks, a source of friction disproportionate to its importance. Ellie found the recording performative. I found the book an additional administrative task in the hour I have least capacity for administration. The book was quietly retired.

The reward chart. A sticker for every page. Lasted eleven days before the stickers were being deployed as a negotiating currency in unrelated contexts.

Sitting down at the table specifically for reading. The specific formality of it produced resistance. It felt like homework. It felt like assessment. It activated the same response in her that the word "practice" activates.

What is actually working

Reading in the wrong places. Cereal boxes at breakfast — she reads the text on the packaging, slowly, with no pressure on pace or error. Menus when we eat out. The signs at the swimming pool. Reading that happens because of where we are rather than because I have decided it is reading time.

Audiobooks plus text. She listens to a story on her Yoto player while following along in the picture book edition. I do not know if this is an approved method. I do not particularly care whether it is an approved method. She is encountering text in a context where the audio is doing the heavy lifting and the visual decoding is following at its own pace.

Choosing her books, not the school's. The school's reading scheme sends home books calibrated to reading level. Ellie finds them boring. A bored child does not read willingly. I let her choose from the library — any book she wants — and we read whatever she picks together, with me reading the hard words and her taking the ones she can manage. The library has much better board books than most homes, as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, and the extension of this observation is that the library has better choices than any prescribed reading scheme.

The competitive comparison I am trying not to do

Other children in Ellie's class are already reading fluently. I know this because Ellie tells me, with the particular mixture of admiration and self-assessment that five-year-olds deploy with devastating accuracy.

I have been trying not to import the comparison into my own head, where it does no useful work. I have been failing at this with moderate consistency.

What I keep returning to is something I have noticed about Ellie specifically: she learns things in jumps rather than gradients. For weeks nothing, then something lands and she has it completely. This has been true of physical skills, language, social awareness. I have some evidence, therefore, that the reading is coming in its own shape, and that my job is to keep the context warm and low-pressure while the shape develops.

I am doing this imperfectly. I am doing it with genuine belief that it is the right approach. The two things are compatible.

The unexpected piece

Last week she read a sign in a shop window. Not a simple sign — a whole sentence, with punctuation. She did not announce that she was reading it. She just read it, out loud, as information.

I said: "You read that."

She said: "I know." As though this were unremarkable. As though it had been available for a while and she had simply chosen this moment.

I suspect that is exactly what happened.