Vision therapy - not done yet

I'm feeling a little disillusioned about vision therapy lately. Since the Great Leap Forward that happened around September, I haven't really seen much more advance with Dash's reading.

We are approaching the end of his originally scheduled sessions, but when he had an assessment last week the doctor said that his eye teaming was still not great, and added a few more to work on that specifically. I told her that his reading still seemed slower than I would have expected, and she admitted that when he did the Readalyzer test, his eyes were still hopping around the line rather than following the letters sequentially as you would expect.

When we started this, early last summer, I felt that the worst outcome would be if they "passed" him at the end of his allotted sessions, said that everything looked fine on paper, and yet we couldn't see any noticeable difference in his reading. I don't think that's going to happen - some of his numbers have definitely improved, and his reading level has definitely gone up a few notches; maybe I'm just asking for too much. Maybe I should be happy with where we are.

But then. A friend of his was in the house last week - a boy who I know is reading way above his grade level, so I shouldn't compare them at all. But he read the warning on the side of Dash's Beyblade arena (if you don't know, don't worry about it) just the way you or I would, fluently and conversationally, while Dash was still trying to get it together to focus on the first couple of words. It hit me, a little bit.

Reading isn't rocket science. Everyone can read. It's not hard. It shouldn't be this hard. For Dash, I can tell that it's a big effort. He's not lacking desire, or curiosity, or interest, or practice, and he's smart to boot. And yet, I heard him struggling over the word "house" last night as if he'd never seen it before. It's as if he has to start over remembering the rules and concentrating hard every time he cracks open a book.

I just want to know if it will always be that way.

Reading to his sister, which is definitely a first, so I shouldn't complain. 

The secret life of books

I started reading Charlotte's Web to Mabel last night. She's heard bits of it before, when B was reading it to Dash about a year (or more) ago, and she was concerned that she wouldn't like it. She asked me to promise before we started that the pig doesn't die. I said he didn't.

I didn't mention the spider.

I love reading books I loved to my children; but more than that, I really love having the exact copies I read to pass on to them. There's so much history there. Even if some of it isn't even mine. Case in point, this edition.

                                                 

I'm pretty sure I bought it at my local second-hand bookshop (the wonderful and sadly now defunct Exchange, in Dalkey). I couldn't tell you when, but I might have been around ten. It probably cost about 25p. It's a 1976 edition, and still has its original pricetag on the back:

I don't know where or what the APCK bookshop was, but I love that it was 49 and a half pence. The halves mattered.

On the inside, the plot thickens, because there's this:

This is a nuns' book! 

And further, this, written with one of those invisible-ink pens that didn't show up until you rubbed the other end over where you'd written. I had one of those pens, but Thomas Galin (sp?) is not me.

For some reason, I never wrote my own name in, but I can guarantee that it has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it sat in the library of the junior school at Mount Anville or on the shelves of one Thomas Galin. And now it can sit on one of my children's shelves, at least for a while.

******

I hope she doesn't get upset about the spider.

Vision therapy: further update

Dash has a vision therapy assessment this afternoon. I haven't been talking about vision therapy much because I want to do a big reveal when it finishes up, but I'm tired of waiting, and frankly I'm excited about the way things are going.

At the start of the summer, Dash was seven and a bit and fresh out of first grade. He was reading a little above grade level, but it was a struggle and far more halting and laborious than it should have been. He was comfortably reading books like this:

More tellingly, he never spontaneously read a road sign or a store name. He resisted reading anything we asked him to, though he faithfully did his 20 minutes of homework reading every night, eventually, when all other options had been exhausted. He would blink and say the words had gone blurry after a sentence or so, but he'd persevere. It was painful to listen to.

He began vision therapy in June - two half-hour sessions a week, with a few minutes of "homework" to do every morning and evening in between. It's hard to explain what the therapy consists of - reading and pointing and following arrows and picking out highlighted text and finding letters in order and learning how to focus and unfocus his eyes as if he were doing one of those magic-eye pictures that I can never do. Games and puzzles and things on a computer.

We had a preliminary assessment after six weeks or so, and to be honest at that point I was still ambivalent about how things were going. I couldn't see any change, really, in his homework reading. I felt at that point that the worst outcome would be if his reading improved a little, but nothing really changed much, and if we'd never know whether he'd just caught up late as he was going to do all along or if the therapy helped.

Less than a week later, something changed. He started reading the next level up and stormed through a level-three Ninjago book in a few nights. Words didn't go blurry any more. He was reading paragraphs.

Now he's reading text that looks like this:

He's on his third Magic Treehouse book. He's still reading aloud, and only for his 20-minute mandated time, but if you'd told me when we started this that we'd have reached this point as soon as October, I'd have said all my hopes had come to fruition.

Today he was off school. We were talking about his reading and he said "...and when I'm finished all the Magic Treehouse books, I can read higher-level books and when I'm finished all of those I can start reading about real things."

"You don't have to wait till you've finished all the fiction in the library to read about facts, you know. We have a history book at home."

So he did this:

He read two pages about World War II, asking me what things like N-a-z-i and C-z-e-c-h-o-s-l-...  and D-u-n-k-i-r-k spelled, and taking in every word even though his supporting background knowledge and geography are pretty hazy because it's quite an advanced level book of world history.

His handwriting has improved to the point where he's writing essays entitled "Why my writing is so neat." He brought home a report card full of straight A's last week. (This is his first letter-grade report card, so I can't really compare it to previous ones, and I really don't care and don't want to put any pressure on him to stay a straight-A student, but that's a different blogpost.) Last week at a birthday party he willingly read out the list of scavenger hunt items, even though they were in an unfamiliar cursive font.

At Wednesday's session I got talking to another mother. Most of the kids I see at vision therapy are Dash's age or a little older, but this woman's son is in tenth grade, which makes him 15 or so. His deep voice sounds out of place beside my son's piercing trill as they both do their separate exercises with their therapists, around the corner from where I sit and wait.

This mother said they'd spent thousands and tried everything trying to figure out what was going on with her son's reading. He'd bring home A's and B's but his homework was taking seven hours a night. He'd had an IEP (individualized education plan; for children who need extra help while in mainstream schooling due to something like high-functioning autism or ADHD, maybe). Nothing had helped until they discovered vision therapy. She looked at me with hopeful weary eyes and told me we were blessed for finding this now, when Dash is seven, for saving ourselves all those years of struggle. I don't doubt it.

Vision therapy isn't over yet, and today's assessment is to get a better idea of how he's doing and how much more he needs. But I am happy to report that things are looking good. No pun intended.

------------------


To read more about Dash's journey with vision therapy, see here or type "vision therapy" into my Search field. If you wonder whether vision therapy would benefit your child, read this very informative page and take a look at the checklist linked at the bottom. We found a qualified developmental optometrist in our area using this search. Feel free to e-mail me if you've any specific questions, though obviously I'm far from an expert.

Love is...

I love that we can ask Dash if he's a little concerned and he knows we're quoting The Princess Bride.

I love that Mabel just spelled the word "sad" all by herself, and said she knew it was an A in the middle because it's the same sound as in "cat", which is the only word she knows how to spell apart from her name.

I love that Dash is reading an honest-to-God chapter book for his nightly reading these days. A simple one, but a chapter book nonetheless. Before vision therapy, the idea of his reading that much text on a page was unthinkable. The words don't go blurry any more.

I love that Mabel keeps announcing things like "Mummy, three and three more is six!" The wonder of math, afresh.

I love that B is reading The Hobbit to Dash at bedtime these days. I thought it might be a bit ambitious, but so far it's going well.

I love that when Dash criticized Mabel's drawing of a dinosaur, she replied, "When you say that, it makes me feel as if I'm not important." He apologized. I high-fived myself in the kitchen.

I love that Dash is finally old enough to make his own damn cardboard swords instead of bugging us to do it.

I love that Mabel can brush her teeth all by herself.

I love that we can take public transport into the city, walk around, do a museum, and get home again WITHOUT A STROLLER. Escalators and steps are so much easier than finding the hidden elevator every time.

I do love babies, but I love having big kids too.

Vision therapy update

Dash has been doing his vision therapy for a while now - a half-hour session twice a week, with "homework" every day. We have had letter charts and arrow charts and number stars taped to the walls, and he has been pointing or reading or dancing or whatever he's meant to do, morning and evening. Sometimes getting him to do it is just like school homework all over again, but he does it, and we hope it's helping.

He'll have another assessment midway through, and I'll be interested to see if the numbers have changed. One thing about this process that I like is that the results are measurable; we're not just wondering if his reading has improved, and if so if it was going to do that anyway. Of the barrage of tests he did at the beginning, we were provided with a list showing the range an average 7-year-old's results would fall into, and then where his results were. Those aspects where his were below that range are the things his therapy focuses on, and when he's re-tested we should see the difference.

We have at least continued with his daily twenty minutes of reading through the summer, even if other plans to beat summer slide, like daily copying out of a morning message, never got off the ground despite my best intentions and his avowed cooperation. This morning he actually continued past the timer's beeping so that he could finish all of Green Eggs and Ham. Admittedly, the plot twist was not unexpected, and he's well able to read all the words; but because he knows it so well he was happy to keep going and - for the first time ever - I heard him read with expression instead of just stumbling over one word at a time. I don't know if the vision therapy has anything to do with it, but I was pleased.

The optometrists had given us, with Dash's report, a list of accommodations we could ask for at school, such as sitting closer to the front, not being asked to copy from the board (changing focus from far to near is a problem point), getting some extra time for reading or writing assignments, that sort of thing. I was called in for a meeting this week to discuss these, and I was very pleased with the way things went.

I met with his teacher for next year, the principal, the guidance counsellor, the head of special ed, the school psychologist (didn't even know we had one) and one other person, and it was mostly just a great opportunity to tell these people - most of whom had not dealt with Dash before, though I bet they'd recognize his big grin - who my son is, what a great kid he is, how much he loves school, and what's going on with his vison right now. They were all open to learning more about how they could help, and we had a great discussion. I left feeling really positive about the school and its staff, which is a lovely way to start the year off.

In a most amazing coincidence, Dash's best friend, daughter of my best friend (known in these parts as Helen's Mom), has some of the same vision problems. There are just two days in age between her and Dash, and though we don't see her so often any more, we spent much of the toddler years together at playgroups and playdates and library storytimes and the like. Helen (not her real name) is also a bright kid struggling more than you might expect with reading, though she's reading at or slightly above grade level. Our story was ringing so many bells with her mom that she got Helen tested too, and vision therapy is probably in their future.

Which makes us wonder whether there was something in the water at all those playdates. Or maybe it was the extended nursing. Dun dun dunnnnn. (THAT WAS A JOKE. I WAS JOKING. I SWEAR I WAS JOKING.)

Ancient history

I like Connie Willis. If you've never heard of Connie Willis, well, you're just like the guy in my local bookshop, except that you probably don't work in a bookshop so the fact that she's a really great and popular and quite prolific fantasy writer is not a travesty. But he, he was a travesty. I don't know why Books-A-Million is still alive when all the Borders Books in the area have closed down.

Anyway. This is a very long lead-in to what will probably turn out to no longer be a remotely funny anecdote when I finally get around to it. And I'm not there yet, you'll have to wait.

I don't get in a lot of reading these days, and when I do it goes in fits and starts. It's usually an author I know and love, because I don't have the patience right now to try out books that might be anything less than great. I'll happily re-read old favourites rather than attempt something new - hence the total revisiting of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey's relationship earlier this year. But I discovered that Connie Willis had written a new* book - in fact, two - and put them on my birthday list. B gave me Blackout for my birthday, and I saved it to read on the way to BlogHer. I finished it last week and discovered that it's not so much the first in a series of two, as half a story, the other half of which is another whole (even fatter) book called All Clear. So of course I had to get my hands on All Clear ASAP, without even waiting for Amazon.

This is why we ended up visiting two bookshops in two days, and why Dash ended up getting two new books in two days, even though there's a perfectly lovely library with plenty of reading matter right there in our town. (Mabel also got one new book.) The first bookshop didn't have any Connie Willis at all (see above), but Dash still had to get something, and he chose a National Geographic Kids book on tigers. The next day in a much better-stocked Barnes & Noble, he picked up a National Geographic Kids book on Martin Luther King and was all excited, so who was I to deny my son the reluctant reader such an educational item?

[Here, just to keep up the thrilling suspense (ahem), let me mention how great those National Geographic Kids books are. Dash is a bright, curious kid with a great vocabulary, but his reading level is not high. So trying to keep him engaged with a book that's easy enough for him not to stumble over every word is often a struggle, because so many of the first readers are insultingly simple. He likes the "I Can Read" superhero books, and they are at a good (easy) level for him, but he also has a selection of the National Geographic ones, and those are what he looks for now in the bookstore.

]

Oh God, now I've built it up so much that I'm afraid to tell my piddly little story.

Anyway.

Schoolkids in America know all about Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement is heavily featured in kindergarten, if not before. Even the nursery-school attendees know about him, thanks to Martin Luther King day in January every year. As an Irish schoolchild, I did not have Martin Luther King anywhere on my radar, but I must have heard his name somewhere along the line.

So at the start of secondary school (seventh grade) our history teacher began by looking at the pictures on the front cover of our textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, I think it was called, and asking if anyone knew what was depicted. Looking at a drawing of an oldy-timey man with long hair hammering a scroll to a wooden door, something I had seen or read elsewhere came back to me, and I tentatively raised my hand.

"Yes, Maud?"
I was diffident but smug: "Is it Martin Luther... King?"

As I said the first two words, it had occurred to me that there was often another one appended. Adding the "King" was an afterthought, really. I thought it would make me sound even cleverer.

Sadly, one word makes all the difference. My teacher went from admiration to amusement in the space of that single syllable. (Though really, she should have been doubly impressed: I knew two historical people, after all, even if I didn't realise it myself.)

This morning I was recounting the story to B, who somehow had never heard it before. Dash wanted to know as well. "You knew about Martin Luther King too?" he asked, incredulous.

Whereupon B had to get all smartypants: "Martin Luther King TWO? There's a sequel? 'He's back and he's mad.'"


*New as in three years ago, apparently.

Diagnosis

We had the meeting to discuss the results of Dash's vision assessment, and this - in bald terms - is what we learned:

• He has an oculomotor dysfunction. That means his eyes don't track smoothly or move easily from one line of text to the next.
• He has a binocular vision dysfunction. This means his eyes don't work together quite the way they should. This is what makes the words blurry and makes it hard for him to read from the blackboard.
• He has difficulties with visual memory.

He's going to start therapy in a few weeks, two sessions a week if possible, for 36 weeks. They say his "prognosis for improvement with timely intervention is very good. "

The tests also showed things he was good at. He can tell left from right like a champ, which impresses me no end as I still have to stop and think every time. He's very good at reading made-up words, which proves that he knows all the rules and applies them. I know he can read pretty much any word he wants to; it just seems that his eyes get in the way sometimes. His fine-motor skills and shape-copying skills are dandy, so his bad handwriting is within the bounds of normality and let's just say he gets that from his father.

The doctor was particularly impressed, if that's the word, with the way Dash tackled one of the tests. He was asked to read out loud along a line of unevenly spaced numbers, and then to the next line, and so on. She and I both observed that when he got to the end of the first line, he looked down to the end of the line directly below, followed it back to the start, and began reading aloud again from there. It worked - he didn't lose his place - but it was tedious and slow and not the way the rest of us read lines of text. She said she'd never seen that tactic before, though.

I still have a lot of thoughts about all this. It seems like a very first-world problem. It seems like a very privileged solution. (Our insurance will probably pay for half of the therapy - the oculomotor part - but not the rest.) It seems like the sort of thing one could easily be duped about - what parent, when told they can give their child extra help, would say "Nah, we'll just let him keep doing it the hard way, thanks." Our bullshitometers were, if not exactly on high alert, at least engaged. Let's just say that our healthy Irish cynicism had us vaguely wondering if they're just trying to part us from our dollars.

Naturally, I also wondered what we'd be doing at this juncture if we were still in Ireland. I have no idea whether an assessment would be possibly or any therapy available if we were there. Would we be told he's a slow reader and left at that? (I'm inclined to believe that many "slow readers" have these problems, but have been left to fend for themselves and catch up if they could. How long would it take? How much would they fall behind? Or does the pace of schooling now mean we have to catch up more quickly whereas back then (whenever "then" was) it wouldn't have mattered so much?
 
But on the whole, though vision therapy is a fairly new field, it seems to get good results, and, obviously, deciding not to pursue it was not something we seriously considered. Dash's teacher, to name one trustworthy source, has done this for two of her children. The office has excellent credentials and they have a waiting list for therapy and are extending their premises right now. (So if we are being duped, we're not alone.) I asked the doctor, "Does it work?" and she told me it does. I'm willing to give it a whirl, because I can't imagine a life where reading is not a source of joy and excitement and the best pastime I could ask for.

Lots of kids have speech therapy; this is vision therapy. We'll see what happens.

**************

If you want to find out more, I found this Reading and Vision site very useful and used the checklist linked there to decide we should investigate further. I found the office we used from the directory at the College of Optometrists in Vision Development site, which lists those qualified in behavioral, or developmental, optometry.

Extra-vision

 
You may remember that Dash got glasses late last year. I hoped that that would do the trick, and his reading would take off like a rocket, the way his teacher assured me that with his large vocabulary and interest in learning, it was bound to.

But it didn't. We sort of ignored it, and his reading did improve. He ended first grade reading at a mid-second grade level, which should be perfectly good enough for anyone. And yet. It didn't help that I kept hearing tales of his peers who were suddenly leaps and bounds ahead of their supposed reading level - I mean, a certain number of people have to be average (because we don't live in Lake Wobegone), and I'm not demanding that everyone has to admit that my baby is brilliant... but.

I still had the feeling there was more to it. The tipping point came last week when a comic arrived in the mail - a late birthday present that's a bit more advanced in reading requirement than the sender realised, I think, but Dash was eager to get stuck in. Listening to him laboriously sound out the contents of each speech bubble was painful. Thinking harder about it, the all-caps style of comic writing probably makes it harder to recognise words than the ups and downs of regular mixed case; but surely he should be further ahead than that by now, I thought. Something just hasn't clicked for him the way it should have.

I asked some helpful people online, and some helpful people online gave me just what I needed: the vocabulary to Google the right resources. What I needed to look for was not just a regular optometrist, or ophthalmologist, but a behavioral or pediatric or developmental optometrist/ophthalmologist. These are doctors trained not just to assess how well people's eyes work, but also how well the eyes are working together and sending messages to the brain, and how the brain is interpreting those messages.

In short order, I had found this website and this directory, and was feeling a lot more proactive about the whole thing.

A lot of what that Vision and Reading page said had me nodding and aha-ing. I got Dash to look at the examples of blurred text and he spotted the one that looks the way his blurry words look. (They're only blurry sometimes, but I don't think that's the full extent of his issue.) The clincher was the checklist: I came up with a score of 29. They say anything over 20 warrants further investigation.

The next morning I called our pediatrician's office and our local optometrist to see if they had any recommendations, but in the end I used the COVD directory and found an office not too far away that sounded from their website as if they were just what we needed. They had an appointment for an initial eye test on Tuesday, so along we went.

Tuesday's was mostly a regular eye test with a few different elements and a chat with the doctor about why we were there. But what we said, and my answers on their slightly different checklist, were enough for them to bring us back in today for a two-hour long evaluation that covered how Dash reads, how he sees and interprets and remembers shapes, how he writes and spells, how his eyes track lines of text, and probably many other factors I didn't even know were being assessed.

The paperwork included a question sheet to be filled in by the child's teacher, but with only two days' lead time (we'd filled the spot of a cancellation) I didn't manage to get hold of Dash's teacher before the appointment. However, she called me back later and said that her own children had benefitted from vision therapy, that she'd been surprised when Dash did not test into TAG (the more advanced stream) based on her observations of him, and that she had wondered why his reading hadn't improved even more than it did this year. (You know, I do feel she should have said something about that to me without this prompting.) So we'll add her input to the pile too.

We wait two weeks for all the information to be put together, and then we go in for a conference to see what's up. It's likely not to be something that's a quick fix with new glasses; it might be something that calls for vision therapy. I don't know if there's a middle path between those two. Worst/best-case scenario, I suppose, we just paid out of pocket to be told that our son is a perfectly average slowish reader. I would be okay with that. Honest. I don't want him to be a supergenius hampered by dyslexia. (It's probably not dyslexia. But the problems we're talking about are in that sort of family.)

I will keep you posted.

Decimal

Dash couldn't sleep last night, so he requested a notebook and a pencil and wrote a book. As you do. Then he fell asleep for a few minutes and dreamed that theives came in and stole his pages, and woke up in a fright. I had to lie down with him for aaages to get him back to sleep, and by then it was my bedtime and the 3:10 to Yuma is going to have to wait for another day. (Which is okay with me. It's one of those "We should probably see it" films. Is it any good, really? Have you watched it?)

Anyway, this is his book, all three pages plus cover:

 Ten is a Grat Nomber by [redacted]

 My favorite nomber is 10. 10 is a good nomb[er] becus it is the first 2 nomberd nomber.

Nombers are grate but i'd say 10 is better out of them all. 1 to 100 is not all.

Nombers go on forever, but I stil think 10 is better.

I can't wait for the next thrilling instalment. I think he displays a grasp of the concept of infinity and a general liking for digits that I find admirable, though I'm not sure why he says "better" all the time instead of "best." I also note that his literary inclination is not towards fiction.

I told him how to spell "favorite" (the American way, to my chagrin) and to put another t in better, but the rest (as you can tell) is all his own work. He has the vaguest of understandings that I used to have a job in the outside world and of what it was, so he asked me, "And tomorrow, will you do that thing you used to do, in the library or wherever it was...?" He meant would I edit it. I said I would.

************

Some time after Christmas, homework stopped being the royal pain in the ass it had been. Mostly because I stopped caring so much, and therefore stopped bugging him to do it when I thought he should be doing it. He does his homework every night, usually not until Mabel has been taken upstairs to bed and is therefore no longer a distraction. It doesn't take long. Then we go through his spelling words either orally or by typing them into SpellingCity.com and letting him take a test on the computer, which is a great attraction. And he does his twenty minutes' reading with us at bedtime, before or after stories.

It's all very low pressure and I'm fine with that. I can see that his writing has got neater, his punctuation is pretty good, and some weeks he gets 100 percent in his spelling test. His reading level has leapt from a 12 (on the DRA scale) at the beginning of the year to a 24 this month. (Which sounded spectacular to me until I heard that some other kid went from 12 to 40. What an overacheiver. Sheesh.) But things are moving in the right direction and nobody is stressed out, and that makes me happy.

So all in all, first grade turns out to have been just fine.

Magical optical

Dash had a four-day weekend because of the teacher training day on Friday and then Martin Luther King Day and the presidential inauguration on Monday. On Saturday, I asked him where his glasses were. Like this:

- Dash, it's time to do some reading. Where are your glasses? I remember you didn't wear them reading last night.
- Where did you leave them, Mummy?
- Where did I leave them? I didn't have them. Aren't they in your backpack?
- No, you put them somewhere.
- No. No, I didn't. Are they at school?
- No, I brought them home.
... etc.

Dash was sure they were in the house, and I was sure they weren't. We'd brought them safely across an ocean and back, not to mention running the daily gauntlet of leaving them in the kitchen of a house containing three teenagers, but apparently now they'd disappeared. (They come with a great warranty. It says that if you break the frame or the lenses, you get the first new ones free and subsequent ones for just $25. But if you lose them entirely, you just have to go and buy new glasses.) I also realised we hadn't put his name on them or even on the case.

I decided to assume that the glasses were in school, hopefully sitting on his desk or somewhere else in his classroom, even though he assured me that they'd come home with him on Thursday evening and I had put them somewhere mysterious.

Yesterday when he came out of school the first thing I asked him was if he'd found his glasses.

- Yes! Somehow - poof! - they were in my desk, even though they'd been at home and I didn't bring them back into school with me.

As if by magic! Wonderful. I particularly liked the poof! part.

We have the follow-up at the optician's tomorrow. His father and I are not convinced that the glasses make a whit of difference, other than perhaps as a rather expensive placebo that enticed Dash to do his homework more eagerly for the first week of having them. Maybe the eye doctor will be able to magically tell something when he peers into Dash's eyes and whirr-clicks the lenses into the machine and asks him to read the lines of letters.

Or maybe his reading is just improving slowly the old-fashioned way, with practice.

Chapters

A few weeks ago I volunteered at the elementary school's Scholastic book sale, to help the younger children note down which books they wanted their parents to shell out for and stop the older ones making off with the keychain minifigs attached to the front of a few most-sought-after volumes. In between deluges, I perused the small selection of books aimed at the parents and teachers: a slow-cooker cookbook, a multi-columned calendar that claimed to solve all my problems, and some books about how to raise readers.

Mostly, I shun parenting books these days, having had my fill when Dash was a baby and I was still convinced that somebody, somewhere, had had this model before and had helpfully published the manual. Once I figured out that this wasn't going to happen, I became bitter and cynical and decided to take all my advice from trusted figures and random strangers on the Internet instead, because that seemed much less stressful. But as the kids get older, we're moving into new territory, and since I really do want to raise readers - after all, I was one, and I thought it was great - I leafed through this particular tome with some amount of interest.

A heading caught my eye - something about why children should be reading (or have read to them) chapter books. Why should they, I wondered? Apparently it's ideal for helping train their memories to recall what's gone before and predict what might come after - all the skills they need for analytical reading later on. All righty, then. But I had tried starting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Dash a year or so ago, and he just hadn't had the attention span. I'd mostly forgotten about it since, and our library haul continued to be a stream of not-too-long, nicely illustrated picture books that would keep the attention of both 6- and 4-year-old, as well as one or two mind-bendingly tedious Dora or Diego books and maybe a Star Wars easy reader to entice Dash to practice.

But most nights now, Mabel goes straight to bed before Dash's storytime - I try to do some reading with her around lunchtime instead. So keeping the four-year-old's interest doesn't really need to be in the mix. And having seen the piece about chapter books, one night a couple of weeks ago when I was doing bedtime by myself, I asked Dash if he'd like us to start Charlotte's Web.

"Is that the one about the spider?" he asked.
"Yes. Do you know about it?"
"I know what happens. The spider dies at the end. Daddy told me."

Okay. I'm not sure how, but for some reason the denoument of the children's classic had slipped out on the way to school one morning. Dash didn't mind, and was willing to start the book anyway. (I think it's easier for him if the stress of the unknown is tempered a bit.) I opened the paperback copy that I had picked up second-hand some time in the dim and distant past when I was ten or eleven. (Or younger: I think I remember my Dad reading it to me and doing the voices. So maybe I was seven.) The pages are yellowed and a bit crispy, and the cover has been so creased that it's smoothly wrinkled all over, but it's perfectly functional. There are line drawings every few pages, which helps the novice chapter-book reader.

All the same, I was surprised when Dash was still listening at the end of the first chapter, which to my mind was not all that thrilling and contained some puzzling references. I remember being a little mystified by the school bus, since we didn't have those in Ireland - not that that's a problem for Dash - and finding the brother's name, Avery, very odd. The mid-century rural American setting was almost as unfamiliar to Dash's ears as it had been to my suburban Irish ones thirty years earlier, but he didn't seem to mind. I quizzed him gently at the end of each part to make sure he was following along, and with some prompting it seemed he had gleaned the main points. So we continued.

I read it for two nights and then his Dad took over. Dash started telling me what was going on in the farmyard every day. From my place beside Mabel, as she dropped off, I could hear B in Dash's room doing the voices just the way my Dad used to - the goose and the rat and Mister Zuckermann and everyone else.

They finished Charlotte a few nights ago and started straight into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - the copy I'd had the foresight to bring, with its sequel, from my bedroom bookshelves in Dublin one or two trips ago. (My bedroom remains, for now, just as it always was, and functions as a handy library for my Dad, who picks up some obscure required literature from my English degree every now and then and milks it for every drop of Victorian wisdom. Nobody looks at all the books that are my real treasures: the small shelf of young-adult fiction right beside the bed. I'm keeping them all for Mabel.)

Charlie proved so exciting that B had to read six chapters on the first night. Dash didn't want to go to sleep that night, begging to find out what was going to happen next:

"Just tell me, Mummy, does he get to go to the chocolate factory?"
"Listen. It's a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Do you think it's all about how a boy called Charlie didn't get to go to a chocolate factory?"
"Oh. Good point. .... But does he get to go?"

I put his mind at ease on that point and he finally went to bed.

Can you imagine what the suspense will be like when we start with Harry Potter? And how soon can we do that, do you think? I have the box set (UK editions, of course) at home, and I can bring it over any time...

Charting success

As soon as Mabel started school this year, the immediate challenges that came to light revolved around the bathroom. At school, not unreasonably, they try to get the children to use the bathroom after snacktime. Mabel did not like being told when to go. She, further, did not like the fact that when she went, the teachers wanted her to - most unreasonably - keep her underpants round her ankles and her shoes on her feet. She was used to kicking everything off so she could straddle the seat comfortably, and though I'd tried to instigate some keeping on of stuff before the school year began, because I wasn't exactly blind to the fact that this was going to be an issue, it hadn't really gone down well.

I don't know how this had resolved itself last year, but somehow it wasn't a problem then. She was toilet trained by about March, so she'd clearly spent about three months using the bathroom, or being allowed refuse to use it, in her old classroom without incident. In September, though, - new classroom, new teachers, new people to inculcate in the ways of Mabel; or vice versa.

Mabel and I spent a fraught few mornings before she'd agree to darken the door of the classroom working out some sort of compromise whereby I would tell the teachers that she would go if she needed to, and they wouldn't make her. They agreed, but tried to make her anyway. She refused. Stalemate was reached, but they gradually realised that, like her brother before her, she has a bladder of steel and doesn't need to go all morning.

Meanwhile, though, I thought we should tackle the pants-round-ankles business as soon as possible, and the most direct method seemed to be some form of bribery. A star chart might do the trick, I thought. So I drew a few lines on a piece of paper. While I was at it, I thought I'd add a column for cleaning up, and of course there'd have to be a complementary chart for Dash too, because heaven forefend she have even the prospect of some new thing if he didn't too. Casting about for something to fill the other side of Dash's chart with, I decided maybe he could do some reading practice.

And so, the new chart was affixed to the fridge. Mabel's prize, if she ever tidies up anything again in her life, will be - surprise! - a new baby. Dash filled in his prize suggestions himself, so they might be a little hard to read, but it says "Litsaber" [light saber], "woch" [watch], "new shoes!"

As you can see, the toilet practice was a total success. In fact, after about three days she was happily keeping her knees together (such a lady) and her shoes on, which I'm very pleased about even if she never actually uses these new abilities in school. With winter approaching, it's a good thing in general.

Dash's reading practice also went really well - I told him ten minutes' reading was enough to get a star, and he was totally motivated to pick up a book any time I could sit down with him. Sadly, once those stars were filled in the habit didn't persist, but maybe I can start another one for something else. When he'd finished with the reading stars he started trying to earn clean-up stars as fast as he could, only just stopping short of making a mess in order to be rewarded for cleaning it up. (No need for that. There's always a mess around thanks to his sister's habit of playing with a small subsection of every different thing at once. Though I did have to stop him from cleaning up when she was still in the middle of playing.)

So, on Sunday, the chart reached the dizzying heights you see in the picture, with all of Dash's stars filled in. (Please excuse the crumple marks. Mabel was making her displeasure known one day.) I knew we were in for trouble. Dash spent all morning mooning around asking when we'd be going to Target to buy his new thing. Mabel spent all morning telling me earnestly how it wasn't fair if Dash got a new thing and she didn't. Pointing out that when (when? if ever?) she fills in her side of the chart, she'll get a new thing and he won't, did nothing for me. We did not go en famille to Target for the purchasing of the object; I sent Dash with his father and instructed them to pick up a small item from the $1 section to appease The Unappeasable One.

Dash came home with not a light saber, not a watch, and not shoes, but a new Nerf gun (oh joy); and they brought Mabel a tube of glow bracelets, which kept her happily entranced all afternoon.

So that worked out better than expected. Next chart: back to eating vegetables, perhaps.

Patience and time

To be honest, I thought he'd be reading by now. Or at least, reading a bit more fluently than the halting, frustrating, stopping-and-starting pace he's going at these days.

It's all very well being all Waldorfy and lovely and telling everyone how the children don't even look at a letter in Finland till they're seven, and they have the best educational system in the world, but the truth is that, sadly, we're not in Finland. And I'm starting to see how the system here is really geared towards the children who are already reading, even though the "official" list of sight words they're supposed to know at this stage is only 30 long.

I can see, for instance, how tonight's homework would have been the work of a fun ten minutes to a fluent reader and more willing writer. Dash had to read a story and then write down the title, author, setting, characters, and his favourite part. There may have been space for a picture in the middle too, but we ignored that. The instructions didn't even say "Read a story with an adult", but since the only books he can read himself are definitely devoid of character and setting, I helped him read one of his Spider-Man books, and then we went through the required information and figured out what to write where. It took forever, even without the drawing.

"They have to teach me to read first," wailed Dash. "That would make it easier." We sighed, and explained that that's what they're doing, but he has to practise. He was unconvinced. It makes me think of that point in a learning curve where the old way was faster but you have to plough through in the new way because it will get better - like when I learned to type. It was quicker to hunt and peck with two fingers, but I had to keep doing it the other way if I ever wanted to get any better. For him, he's at that point where he can do it, but it's so tedious and time-consuming that it always seems harder than the alternative. Especially where the alternative is just not reading.

I don't remember what I was doing in class or for homework when I was six - the only things I remember learning that year were how to receive Holy Communion and how to knit - but I know I was an early reader, so I suspect homework like tonight's would have been pretty easy for me at that age. I don't remember a time when reading was ever a chore. I do remember looking at the boys in my class struggling over dotted lines in workbooks (at some age, not necessarily first grade) and wondering why on earth they couldn't write their letters more neatly. It's still hard not to let my frustration show.

And we went at it badly today. I didn't realise that homework would start in earnest this week (duh, really), so I let them kill time but not each other in the playground after school pickup. And then there were other unforeseen events, so that by the time homework happened, Dash was eating a sandwich with one hand and using at least half his brain to feel hard done by about the TV show he had missed. Tomorrow I will be more on the ball, I promise.

We all sorely need a routine after the summer. Homework is just going to have to be part of it, and the reading will come.

Go, Dash, Go

It's still Spring Break, you know. I mean, the husband came home and all that, which was nice because now I feel like I can breathe again - not that I was asphyxiating for lack of him, but just that when it's me and only me with the kids, there's no safety net, no room to manouevre, no end of the day in sight - but on the other hand, now he's at work and I'm still here with two children, one of whom might be asleep for a scant hour in the afternoon if I'm lucky. At least the weather's nice.

------

We were given a copy of Go, Dog, Go for Mabel's second birthday. It was sort of an in-joke from the friend who gave it to her, because her son loved it and was always excited to go to a party because the dogs in the book go to a party in a tree at the end. He was thrilled to be invited to her birthday party, so we got the book. To be honest, I didn't think much of it - boring, basic, and without even a rhyme to pull it along for the poor benighted adult reader. I saw it as inferior, wannabe Seuss.

But now, I get it. Dash is at the point where he can sound out three-or-four-letter words pretty well, but even our "Beginner" I-Can-Read book was too hard - and babyish - for him, with its proliferation of hard words like "whose" and "mouse". He was badgering me to make a book for him on my computer, composed entirely of words he knows. (And what a thrilling epic that would be.) But then I thought that we must, surely, have some books that would work that way. One Fish, Two Fish, maybe, or Go, Dog, Go.

So I pulled it off the shelf a week ago, and this morning, after three or four sessions, he finished it. (It's quite a long book, you know.) Okay, so the narrative isn't exactly engaging for those of us used to something more at the level of historical fiction or true crime, but as far as he's concerned, it's the best book ever written. And watching him work through from the first, simplest page through the antics of those crazy dogs with their hats and their boats and their cars - well, I have a new appreciation for the story. More importantly, I can see how each page's words build on the learning in the pages before, so that he learns "out" and on the next page comes to "around", with the same -ou- sound, but a bit more of a challenge.

I'm not saying he got every word himself right off the bat - I helped when he got stuck - but the repetition within the book, and created by starting at the beginning again every time, made it easier for him. This morning he ran upstairs excitedly to find the book and reached the very last page, jubilant.

As boring books go, I'm starting to really like this one.

Light reading

Our cardboard supplies were dwindling dangerously. Nary a superhero mask had been made in recent times, and the days of the robot costume were well nigh forgotten. We almost thought we might have to go and buy some large item of furniture in IKEA, just so that there would be box fodder for young Monkey to demand we make things out of.

B fished a copy-paper/moving box out of the basement, to forestall such drastic measures. He started to make the lid into a shield, as requested, one morning before work, but it was left half finished and then was somewhat dismantled by Mabel, who enjoys dismantling things. Luckily, my friend Anonymous came to the rescue. (That's her name. It always says so right there in the comments.) Let's call her Ano for short. She came over for a playdate on Monday - except that her daughter was in summer camp, so it was a very calm and quiet playdate compared to the normal sort. And while I was upstairs putting Mabel down for her nap, Ano fashioned for Monkey the most wonderful shield, and sword - of his design, he'll have you know - ever.

Monkey spent the rest of the day exclaiming over Ano's brilliance, and telling us how much better at making cardboard shields she was than Daddy, who was even more in the ha'penny place, as my mother would say, than usual, after this event. (Daddy is regularly judged to be "medium" in the greatness stakes. Mabel and I are the best Mabel and Mummy (respectively) he's ever had, but Daddy is just about medium. Poor Daddy. Of course, the joke here is that then I have to respond "I'm the only Mummy you've ever had", and then everyone falls about laughing. He's lucky he has a two-year-old to appreciate his jokes. She's the perfect audience, really.)

Anyway, the next morning, Daddy was found useful enough, begrudgingly, to be employed writing "KNIGHT" in various places, as directed, on the back of the shield. In case the user should be in any doubt about his occupation, I suppose, so he could just take a quick look from whatever angle he happened to be at in his vigorous slaying of foes, and read his job description right there.

Later that day I heard Monkey trying to sound out the letters - though of course, he knew it was supposed to say knight, but he was making an effort to read it. Knight is probably the worst possible word he could have chosen to start reading with - unless he'd tried "psychic" or "slough" or "onomatopaeia", perhaps.

So I sat down and wrote a list of words he would know that rhymed with "knight" and had the same -ight ending: fight, might, right, night, light, sight, and flight. And showed him how you couldn't sound out each letter, but you could learn to recognise that all these words went together, and then you just needed to figure out the initial sound to read them. He started to get the hang of it.

We went on to do some simpler lists: cat and other -at words; dog and other -og words. Mabel wanted in on it too, of course, but Monkey was the one really taking things in. Today at lunchtime I heard him pick up the page (which I had left nonchalantly on the coffee table) and start reading through, working mostly from memory and partly from sounding out. After every word, he'd pop his head around the door and tell me, excitedly, "I just read 'fight' all by myself!"

He's not an early reader, and I suspect Mabel will pick this all up much faster than he does, but it's so nice to see him start to put it all together, one painful letter at a time.

Acheivements

Yesterday, out of the blue, Monkey announced that two plus two equals four. I was quite pleased. I asked him what two plus three would be, and he got that right too. Then I hazarded five plus two, and he guessed six, so I told him to count it on his fingers, which he did, came up with seven, and was delighted with himself.

I have no idea whether four and seven-and-a-half months is young or old or average for such an achievement, and I don't really care either way. I'd shown him how to count on his fingers before and he'd never quite got the idea, so to see him work it out for himself gave me that tiny thrill you get when your child does something new.

I suppose these moments are rarer as they get older. The night before, while not going to sleep, Mabel had picked up a Colors and Shapes book and identified not just the Ss and the Os on the cover, but also the C. Maybe it was a lucky guess, but I was impressed. Then again, it impresses me when she calls green green and red red, instead of blue or orange or some other random colour, so her bar is, of necessity, lower.

[Speaking of which, low bars are no impediment to her. In the past days she has been discovered leaning over the top of the low white toy shelves, straining to reach something at the top of the high wooden toy shelves (luckily, she picked the set that are anchored to the wall), and teetering on the chair trying to climb up the bookshelves in the front room. Serious supervision is needed. We haven't got a photo yet because we're always too busy pulling her off the item in question.]

I was co-opping in Monkey's class yesterday. As usual, one of the little girls sat down beside me at the art table and proceeded to draw a mommy and baby, complete with eyelashes and eyebrows. Another day a different girl had copied out an entire sentence in perfectly legible letters - albeit running from right to left across the page instead of left to right. Monkey prefers to work in broader strokes, and I'm still delighted when he writes his name or copies out someone else's. (They have a real mailbox in the classroom, and they can put in letters for other class members, or teachers, or parents can leave letters for them, and they're all distributed at the end of the day. It's a really great way to get them drawing and writing and interested in reading for themselves.)

I can't really compare Monkey's fine-motor skills with those of the other boys his age, because it's almost always the girls at the art table: the boys are mostly off fashioning large blocks into fire engines and (play-)microwaving the (play)phones. I'm pretty sure any people he draws don't get eyelashes and eyebrows: I'd be happy if they had arms and legs. Then again, he's not interested in drawing people, but lately has produced images of the air-conditioning unit and the remote control and TV.

I'm telling you, he's an engineer.

Writing and reading

I'm at home with no children. It's the first morning of the child swap, and Mabel hardly even noticed as I waved her goodbye and left her in the most capable hands of my friend-who-will-be-a-doula. "I'll be fine," I said, and she laughed. And I walked back up the hill strangely empty handed and unburdened of back.

I have resolved to use this time only to do things I can't do when the kids are here. So no picking up, no cleaning the kitchen, no laundry: blogging is okay, but I shouldn't be checking Facebook (too much). Really I should be writing or editing or working on something I might get paid for, but I have yet to organise anything like that, though I did go to the lengths of joining LinkedIn, which seems to be a sort of cross between Monster.com and Facebook: you make "connections" with people you've worked with or who are in your area, and people can search for you and read your resume and make connections with you, and you can ask for recommendations. Unfortunately, neither of my two old bosses from Dublin seem to be on it, but a lot of other people I've worked with are, so it's fun catching up with what everyone's doing these days, even if nothing actually happens from it.

I might also use this time to do things like sorting out winter clothes or big cleaning/tidying tasks that I can't do without little people clustering round me (yes, two can cluster) demanding to know what this is and what that is for and then taking everything away to play with instead.

But here I am today. I've written two paragraphs of Something Else (to be unveiled Sometime in the Future, or quite possibly Never At All) and I'm blogging so that this evening when B fires up an episode of his latest Netflix-on-Demand discovery, The IT Crowd (very amusing BBC comedy by the writer of Father Ted), I can give it my full attention.

*******

I was going to say that I love having a four-year-old. For some reason, perhaps because I started school at four and have at least some memories of being four, I feel it's a big step up from three. Monkey can be depended on to trail after me in a shop without being chivvied from pillar to post; he can open his car door and climb into his booster seat (but not do up his seatbelt just yet); he can - and more importantly, will - get himself dressed; he can quite often put the right shoes on the right feet. He tells jokes (mind you, so does Mabel, but she gets stuck after the first line: her latest is asking: "Why did the mummy chicken cross the road?", but she can't tell you the answer). He wants to help, even if his efforts are sometimes misguided and I have to try not to shout at him for making it worse when I know he's really just trying to make it better.

Yesterday we ventured into a large shop where I didn't need anything, but we'd come out on a wild goose chase and I felt they should be set free, a little. Mabel ran away. I said, totally without irony: "You can run... but you can't hide." Her new trick in shops is climbing under the clothes on the racks and hiding there, and it's either hilarious or terrifying, depending on whether or not I saw her go. Monkey ran after her, tackled her to the ground, and sat on her; as I brought up the rear, wearily commenting, "You don't have to pull her arm out of her socket...or sit on her..." and catching up with them "...and you, Missy, don't have to laugh about it..."

One of the most exciting things about four is the almost reading. I realise this happens at different ages with different kids, but right now Monkey can recognise all the letters* (at least in uppercase; sometimes the lowercases confuse him) and is beginning to get the idea of sounding them out. In his new class they have a "Question of the day" to read every morning when they go in the door, with their very own cut-out lizard to place on the velcro strip under their answer. There isn't time to spell and sound through the whole sentence with him, as other kids are lining up behind us and there are distractions aplenty, but I'm trying to do the first couple of words every day, with the hopes that they'll start to repeat: when and what and how and where and do you think.

So this afternoon [yes, it's later now. Mabel was fine. I was fine. It all worked out great. Round II tomorrow morning at my house] we went to the library and picked up some of the very first beginning-to-read books - the sort with about three words on each page, but a little more interesting and fun than the cat on the mat. I don't know what, if anything, he'll do with them, but I'd like there to be something suitable in the house in case the mood strikes him and he suddenly wants to read a book.

Have you any great first-reading books to recommend? I'd be delighted to hear about them.



*I thought this was just some miraculous progression that happened on its own, but then I realised that his dad drills him on the letters in the frieze around his bedroom wall every night when putting him to bed. They're doing the days of the week now too, and I was amazed to discover that Monkey knows them all, in order. (Doesn't stop him talking about everything in terms of "the day after this day," but maybe some time it will.)