“A … fox.” “Good!”
“A fox … h-h-hops.” The sun slanted in the window, warming the small girl’s cheek as she bent over a 10-page book for beginning readers.
“That’s right!” her mother enthused. “Keep going.”
“A fox hops … up and down?”
“Sweetie, don’t look at me, look at the page. The page will tell you what the words are.”
Little eddies of concern and hope ran back and forth across the child’s features. She guessed again, examining her mother’s face as if that’s where the words were written. “The fox hops … into a pillow?”
Laughing, her mother tapped the page: “No, no, look at the book! The fox hopped … o-n. …”
“N-o. That spells no.”
“Close! Same letters, but they go the other way. Not n-o, but o-n. That’s the word you’re trying to spell.” With drama, she enunciated: “Awwww … nnnnn.”
“Awwwnnn?” the girl repeated, mystified.
During the first five years of a child’s life, there are certain periods in which the household becomes a kind of extended, intensive seminar for the learning of Great Lessons. I do not here refer to lectures about charity, sharing, dental hygiene or even good manners, important though they are. I am talking about three structural milestones that require intense, prolonged, and, ideally, good-humored effort from both child and parents.
The first is getting an infant to sleep through the night. Boy, that’s fun! Then come accomplishments that the child mostly does instinctively: learning to sit up, to crawl, to toddle, and to move from milk to steak. Soon comes the second big collaborative lesson: Learning to love the lavatory. This also is a great deal of fun.
Once a child is out of diapers, there’s a long, giddy time in which learning is play, and play is learning — until it’s time, or past time, for the child to learn to read.
Oh, then the seminar is in session, friends.
Somehow, 26 letters have to be lodged in a child’s head, a process made complicated by the fact that the names of letters do not necessarily hint at their sounds. “A” is simple enough to grasp, but “double-you?” How does that become “wuh?”
The poor kid then has to learn to string these curious symbols into words, which, once they get past easy-readers, may also lack clues to their pronunciation (see: “knight” and “through”).
Yet it must be done. To unlock the big, beautiful world of books, children have to conquer the language and we have to help them do it, syllable by painstaking syllable.
“See, the picture shows a fox and a bed — no, wait, it’s a cot, c-o-t — and what is the fox doing?”
“Jumping.”
“Well, hopping. How is the fox hopping? Where is he hopping?”
“On the bed,” she replied, as if any fool could see it.
“Yes! You got it! The fox is hopping –”
“– On the bed!”
“On the cot.”
“Awwwnnn the cot. O-n spells on!”
Teacher and student laughed with triumph. It was more of a pebble than a milestone, but they’d take it.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
