And the cold hard truth is that being from The Great South doesn't make it any easier.
In college I worked with a first grade struggling reader for one of my courses. One of my lessons was teaching the short e and contrasting the sound with the short i. You know, in words like pen and pin and ten and tin.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time saying those words into a mirror and trying to hear the difference myself. You try it. No really, I'll wait. Go ahead try and hear the difference in the short e and short i in those words.
Oh, you don't hear it? Now make yourself a beginning reader still trying to learn how to isolate sounds in words. Impossible.
At this point Walker is just breaking the reading code and following the simple rules he has learned. I am treading lightly.
With our curriculum we are getting to the point where Walker is reading words on his own. One of the assignments is to choose a word from a list and write the word and illustrate it.
The first word he chose - Don. He asked me how to draw it. I told him to draw Don however he wanted to.
I come back in and find him coloring wildly with a red and orange crayon.
Me - "Umm, buddy? What are you doing? How is this a picture of Don?"
Him - "You know, don, like when the sun comes up and it goes from dark to sunshine."
Me - "Right - dawn" - Well - (I say to myself - dawn, don, dawn, don) - and ever so slight difference, but "yes dear that is exactly the word those sounds make. Good job."
Some days I feel like I am banging my head on the wall. Like the progress we are making is so slow he might never be an independent reader. But here - I see the light breaking through the darkness. He decoded, matched the sounds with words he knows, and assigned it a meaning. That is reading folks.
We will work on the more complicated vowel patterns like the /aw/ at some point. For now, I'll encourage my little southern reader as much as I can.
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