How Lester learned to read

When I was a Faculty of Education student I came across a book about teaching babies to read. I decided to try it with my firstborn child. In fact Lester seemed to be interested in books from the very beginning.

It's fun to hear the pages of the Bible rustle...

In the afternoon hours when Lester was usually whiny I would lie down by him with a pile of colorful books and read. I had to be really quick in exchanging books! I opened a new book immediately after I fininished the  previous one. Otherwise Lester would be crying. Unfortunatelly, I couldn't start teaching him to read before he started talking. And Lester with all his medical  issues didn't even bubble before 12 months.

How interestig!

When our baby boy was 15 months old he started saying his first words. I printed every new word on an A5 sheet of paper and showed it to him for a few seconds pronouncing it at the same time. I did it a few times a day. When new words were added I rotated them so that there will be just a few in one session. After a couple of weeks I didn't read the word but waited for Lester to recognise it and read to me. It went really well and smooth. The effort was little - only a few minutes a day. And what a satisfaction!

Well, and what happened next?

With these exercises Lester realized there is a meaning behind printed words - he understood the idea of reading. Using plastic letters I taught him to pronounce sounds. At the age of 20 months Lester could read as a whole several words and knew all his letters. Next I started to put the letters together to make words- first on a magnetic board and then written on paper. And so gradually Lester learned how to read. As a 3-year-old he could read new words, never seen before (it is possible because Polish is a phonetical language). Soon he started reading books on his own. We got him out of our hair :)

Lester is reading children's Bible to his sister

I'm glad I tried this educational experiment. Lester greatly benefited from learning to read early . Before he started school he had been practicing reading for a couple of years. He recorded the look of the words before he had to write them. Maybe this is why, in spite of the problems with visual analysis, he never made spelling mistakes!