Only Grown Ups Can Read

As long as she’s been breathing, my little Buttercup has enjoyed a love affair with books. When she was a toddler, our floor was carpeted in picture books. I couldn’t keep them on the shelf. She played with them, paged through them, carried them around, begged me to read them to her, and even dreamed about them (probably). I can imagine her sliding “Wheeeee!” down a hill of floppy picture books in a cloud of butterflies and rainbows and ice cream cones and waking up disappointed in the size of the pile of actual books on her bed. Learning to read seemed like it would be a natural extension of all that affection. I encouraged her to sound out words, to recognize them, to guess based on the pictures . . . nothing.

I asked if she would like me to teach her to read. She did not.

Now, I may have my moments of excessive planning, but I am not a worrier, nor am I in a hurry to get around to much of anything, so I wasn’t too stressed about getting her to read early. Kids don’t usually learn to read until they go to school, right? And she’s not even old enough to go to Kindergarten, so what is the big deal? When she’s ready, she will learn, and on her own time. That was my theory, so I just kept reading to her, no pressure. One day, a few months ago, however, I heard her say something in conversation that shed a new light on the matter.

“Only grown-ups can read,” she said. Only grown ups.

“That’s not true, Buttercup,” I told her. “Kids can read, too.”

“No they can’t.”

“Yes, they can.”

“No. Just grown-ups.”

And then it clicked. She wanted to read. She just didn’t believe it was possible. Buttercup, in all of her language loving glory, thought that I was only having her on whenever I suggested that she learn to read. It had to be a joke because it just wasn’t possible. Reading was a superpower that did not belong to her.

“I learned to read when I was four years old, just like you,” I told her.

Blank stare.

“When I was four years old, I learned how to read books. You can learn, too, if you like.”

Blank stare.

“Would you like to learn to read, too?”

“Yes.”

Brilliant.

That’s when our official “preschool” times began. We’d already used an assortment of workbooks designed to teach phonics and basic pre-reading skills, but it all felt so disjointed and she didn’t seem to be learning anything except how to connect pictures of cats to pictures of cows with pencil lines. It wasn’t about learning to read words. It was about learning to decode pictures, and to associate words with pictures.

Right about four months ago, a few weeks before The Baby was born, we started daily “Preschool” with a primer called The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington. Just to flip through the pages, this book looks incredibly boring. No pictures. No connect the dots. No coloring pictures of objects that start with the letter A.

What makes this book exciting is the knowledge. Reading is, indeed, a superpower, and this guide provides step by step instructions to owning it.

Every lesson challenges her, and yet the pace is so gentle that she seems to already understand almost every lesson before we’ve even begun. The authors cover every phonetical rule – most of which I have never heard in my life - one at a time. And it’s working. After only about four months – punctuated with a little break when The Baby made his initial appearance – my Buttercup is already almost half way through the primer and is reading whole “beginners” books all by herself.

She is training her superpowers.

And boy is she tickled pink about it.

“Did you know that five years olds can read, mommy?”

“Is that so?”

“Yes it is! I’m five years old, and I can read!”

Turns out grown ups aren’t the only ones with superpowers after all.