For the last two years my husband and I
have been trying to get our child to read. After much encouraging,
bribing, yelling, crying, begging, hair pulling... she is now willing
to read on her own, and sometimes, she even enjoys doing it.
And then, I discovered that my child
likes to read at the most inconvenient (and sometimes inappropriate)
times or places.
I remember one incident that took place
a couple of years ago while we were out getting dessert. Up until
that day, I was able to avoid telling my small child about certain
ice cream flavours (the ones embedded with a lot of candy, and
therefore has a lot of extra sugar) because she could not read the
menu. For this outing, my daughter suddenly decided she was able to
read the words 'Easter Egg'. Prior to that words like 'a'
and 'the' were sometimes beyond her reading ability. I was
not quite sure whether I should be proud or annoyed.
Then just last week, my husband was
walking down the street with her when they approached a light pole
where someone decided to exercise their artistic ability and wrote a
word for the world to read. That word of course was F*%#. And, my
curious and now literate child decided that this was the perfect time
to practice sounding out a new word. Being a single syllable word,
and having years of practice with early readers describing different
colour trucks, ducks and pucks (we are Canadian after all...), she
did not have any trouble sounding out the “F” word; and then
proceeded to say it out loud, and quite proudly, to her father in the
middle of the street.
Maybe teaching her to read was not that
great of an idea...
