It was in the John Greenleaf Whittier four-room elementary school, built in 1884 – first grade, I think – and our teacher had gathered us on our little chairs in a semicircle around the blackboard in the corner between the huge high windows looking out over our tiny playground out back.
Along the top of the blackboard were white cardboard rectangles. Each one had a block of color and some letters. The teacher asked us something like, do you know what this is?
And it hit me, the revelation, and I blurted out “Does that mean ‘This is red, this is orange, this is yellow’?” And I was right! And I took to reading as naturally as breathing.
That was – oh, jeez, almost 70 years ago, and never forgotten.
If you mean the “See Tom run! Run, Tom, run!” stage, yes I remember that in first grade. Reading came very quickly from there, it was easy. Like @John_DiFool I knew some words before this.
Yes, I remember clearly the day when I moved from laboriously sounding out the sounds to magically grasping the entire word. I’ve had this experience when studying a language with a different alphabet as well–for example, suddenly seeing “hippopotamus” entire in my classical Greek textbook.
I remember this vividly too. The classroom had a series of those type of books and they got progressively harder. I was determined to get to the higher levels and worked at it determinedly. In fact, I still have a note my first grade teacher sent to my mother saying she was worried because I wasn’t playing - either alone or with the other kids. I just wanted to read the books, and even begged to take them home with me.
I remember it well. I was 4 or 5 and I considered reading an important rite of passage in becoming a ‘grownup’. The first book I managed to read by myself cover to cover was The Little Red Caboose. Which I did of my own accord- in Kindergarten we were still just learning letters and words they spelled. To this day I remember the tremendous sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished it.
A little bit. My parents read to me regularly, and my favorite book was “Go, Dog. Go!” – I apparently insisted that they read it to me every night.
By age four, probably due to a combination of repetition and paying attention to the words in the book as my parents read it, I was able to read that book on my own, and then started to learn how to read some of my other books. When I was in kindergarten (age 5), the teacher started some of us on some very simple reading exercises, which I already found to be too easy (as I could already read).
Yeah, I remember my parents having a box of little word flashcards and they would hold them up for me to read. I remember writing the word ‘Jam’ and making the J curl the wrong way. I learned to read at home with a lot of encouragement and probably pressure from my parents. I think I was already reading Dr Seuss before we started reading at school.
We moved from England to Cyprus when I was 3 and returned before I was 7 these milestones enable me to place some of my earliest memories. I can remember colouring some worksheets at sunday school in England before the age of 3. I can’t remember reading or writing at that age exactly but I remember being taught the alphabet about age 3 or 4
I attended a French immersion school and remember learning to read in French in Grade 1. The first sentence we had to read was, “Luc va à l’école avec son chien Fido.” I remember an activity where we were given printed copies this story about Luc and his dog, and we had to use scissors to cut out all the individual sentences (or maybe even the individual words) and paste them back in the correct order. I vividly remember that they were written in a sans serif font where the uppercase I looked the same as the lowercase l, and I thought it was stupid that words like “Il” (meaning “He”) had two different letters that looked exactly the same.
I only remember that the day school lady who took care of me was so excited by how fast I was picking up reading that she took me out of nap time to sound out a bunch of newspaper headlines. Like a lot of people here, I’d guess, I was an early reader.
Not really. I have memories of my dad teaching me the sounds of the letters, and one very vivid memory of not being able to read fluently (and therefore being baffled by one particular sentence from The House at Pooh Corner), but I don’t remember what came in between.
I also have one memory of being sort-of-but-not-really able to write. I was trying to write a letter to Martina Navratilova that was supposed to say “To Martina, Martina lost,” but the best I could manage was “TOMLT.” Why I thought Martina needed a random American preschooler to inform her that she lost is something of a mystery
My folks read to us a lot but when I got to 1st grade, we started formally learning via ITA and I proudly came home one night and read them and my little brother “Dinosaur Ben” which I think was the 2nd book they introduced.
I also remember memorizing some non-ITA book (probably a Richard Scarry) so that I could trick my teacher into advancing me, so I could follow Jenny Hansen up to second grade - she was actually an advanced reader, I was just smitten.
I can’t time learning to read precisely, but I can say:
I was flummoxed by not being able to read some of the children’s books my father read to me, only to figure out later that they were in German and maybe Dutch, and he was translating.
My Kindergarten classroom had numbers on the floor that we were supposed to line up on when numbers were called out. I pointed out (to no avail) that the numbers faced the teacher and so we children had to read them upside down. Therefore, I know that I could read numbers by 5 years old.
The same classroom had the words to “My Country 'Tis of Thee” posted on the wall. I remember trying to figure out the peculiar grammatical construction “…'tis of thee… of thee I sing.”
Not precisely. I remember steps along the way, but mostly in the sense of “this is how it was taught at my school.” I went to a Montessori school where we learned based on learning the letters, learning their usual sound (the “short” one for vowels), starting with three letter words, then four or more letters, then learning each special sound a combination of letters could make.
I remember one step along the way where the book had the word “blanket,” and I stumbled. It seemed like it would be “blanket,” but my accent (like most I’ve heard) uses a “long A” sound for that vowel, but I was taught that a made the CAT vowel.
I also just have vague memories of the packets and stuff we’d get off the shelf, and how they were put together. And the little booklets that were basically hand made, with laminated construction paper covers.
I don’t remember when I transitioned to reading real things, but I do remember getting engrossed in the pronunciation guide of the dictionary in the classroom in Kindergarten/first grade.
I do remember the basic “see tom run” books in first grade. One time, I think we were indoors for recess (presumably rain or some such) and a classmate wanted help with a word and ask me, I looked, and said something like “Maybe… ‘ick’”? So she continued reading aloud, and it had to do with “slipping on the ick” (the word was “ice”). Guess I got that one wrong!!
After that, I was pretty voracious - would rather read than do anything else.
I don’t remember the process of learning to read, but I do remember a snapshot of a time when I was in the process. I couldn’t entirely read yet, but I could tell what the first letter of a word was, and hence what sound it had to start with, and combine that with the length of the word and the context to make an educated guess as to what the word was.
I don’t think I was entirely reading at the time I started kindergarten, but by the time I was in 1st grade, I was an avid reader. My mom was, at that time, reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (for herself, not to us), and was annoyed when the book disappeared… and then proud when I started giving her daily updates of what the rats were doing.
(aside: I re-read it recently, and it does hold up)
