Learning to Read is Easy...just ask my Grandsons how They learned to Read at Age Six

We were a nation of literate, extremely well read folks from the 1600s through the 1800s. The big decline started in 1930.  So what happened?

Over the last four years in teaching day care staff, home day care business folks and day care center directors, I've done anecdotal research and asked on introductions at the start of class if folks have actual memories of learning how to read.

Few have actual memories of first learning the mechanisms of reading. Most of us somehow just started reading; and a great many of us love to read. 

From a National Education Association (NEA) report in 2004: "The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it fosters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life."

The NEA was created through Congressional legislation in 1854 and from my readings of history it is where the decline of literacy started in the USA.  The NEA and the hold it's having over our country is the problem.

The evidence from reading John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education and Alex de Tocqueville's Democracy in America published in 1832 about 2 decades before the political creation of the NEA supports the hypothesis that the NEA is the problem.

"John Adams spent many years in France and often talked about the fact that France had 24 million citizens but only 500,000 who could read, compared to  America where nearly everyone read. The state of literacy in America was detailed by French jurist and philosopher Alex de Tocqueville, who toured America in 1831 and wrote in his book, “Democracy in America,” pp. 328-329, “Everything about him (the American Frontiersman) is primitive and wild, but … (h)e wears the dress and speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present; he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers. It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts (wilderness). I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous district of France.”
(DON M. POWERS The Edmond Sun)

This is high praise from the French wouldn't you say?    :  ) 


 I was extremely blessed for three years to do child care on and off for my to-be grandsons.  They were five and three years old when they first came into my life. 

One night early into the beginning of first grade for Isaiah, he was in such agony trying to learn to read.  I looked at what he had to read.  It was those Bob Books.  I couldn't believe it.  What the heck kind of books were these?  "Mag sat on a rag rug."  I thought, "Are you kidding me? What drivel." 


I was reading John Taylor Gatto's book at the time and from reading his book I finally remembered how I learned to read.  So I made Isaiah a "Secret Codebook" of phonemes and we started having fun learning how to read.


One night I was talking to my son about Gatto's book and how I finally realized the mechanics of how I learned to read; and I wished I had remembered them when he was young and struggling with public school and learning how to read.  Later, I saw Isaiah thumbing through Gatto's book.

Ah, ha another clue, he's listening to our adult conversation, now he's fascinated by this adult book.  I asked him, "Do you want me to read this book to you?"  Yes, he did and so did his four year old brother, Cole. Cole, also, wanted a Secret Codebook of his own so I made one up about the alphabet.


Ok!  I had bought a share in a CSA farm so the boys could experience being with the land and be little farmers. They loved it.  They preferred going there rather than going to see a movie. So with green beans to prepare we all came to the table.


2 hours.  Two hours I read to them, not one fidget, not one of them had to go to the bathroom, they were in hog heaven.   I read to them about Benjamin Franklin's and Thomas Jefferson's schooling.  


I then went to the Humane Society's Paws and Claws Thrift Store in Vancouver, Washington and bought two adult dictionaries and highlighting pens for the boys.  Again the boys were in hog heaven.  I taught Isaiah how to look up words.  He'd highlight the word he looked up.  Cole wasn't at the reading stage yet so he'd look up pictures and I would read the word and definition to him; and he'd highlight that. 


Isaiah did so well that he got in trouble with his first grade teacher.  She sent home a week's worth of homework, some to do each night.  Well, it was so easy, he did it all in one night.  Public education is about obeying authority more than it is about learning.  So she wasn't happy he did a week's worth of homework in one night.  He had anxiety from being reprimanded by the teacher.


The boys loved going to the library with me.  They didn't want to be in the children's section.  They wanted to be in the adult world so they got books without pictures and graphic novel kind of books.   Most times in the car they had books to read.  They loved it.  Cole was so cute, he kept saying, "Can we go to the library and buy more books."  I'd explain we weren't buying them, but he kept saying it so I slowed down to understand why he thought that way.  The library card looked like a credit card.  :  )


Cole hated Kindergarten.  He's a kinesthetic child, he's got to move!  The night before the first day of first grade he didn't want to go and he said he didn't want to learn how to read.  I looked at him and thought, "Oh, my and he's has to survive 12 years of public education."  I looked at him and I thought what is his motivation then it hit me.  "Cole, I said, do you know why you want to learn how to read?"   He gave me that look, like, "What's Margo coming up with now."  I said, "You want to learn to read, so you can read things adults don't want you to read."  That did it!  He came home from school each day with new words, he'd say the word, sound it out and without it being part of the homework, use it in a sentence.

The boys kept their adult dictionaries and highlighting pens underneath their beds to grab them quickly when the time came to look up some words.

Isaiah's second grade teacher, he said, told him if he struggled with more than three words the book was too hard for him.  So we got an adult book about pirates since the boys loved pirates.  It took him about 40 minutes. He patiently and determinedly looked up a number of words in the dictionary.  He did it.  He read a long page from an adult book.  He felt good about his accomplishment.

This long holiday weekend as we remember how this country of ours came to be and the high literacy rate we had; rejoice in that and see what books your kids want to bring along in the car as you travel from point A to point B and back again. 

More about the NEA and 1930 in a later article. Nancy Drew will help with that story.