Ivana is reading!

Ivana will read this page to you, no problem!
This page was the beginning of Ivana's journey to learn to read...

Today was the time for celebration! We have finished the book that I've been using to teach Ivana to read in Russian. All 95 pages! I didn't expect this to happen this soon! She can read!

I've been teaching her to identify the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet since she was very little. By the age 3 she could remember all 33 of them and was eager to tell them over and over again, so proud of herself. I started with demonstrating her the "sound" that the letter makes first, rather then the "name" of the letter. When she was comfortable with the visual part of recognising the letters, we had moved on to the recognising them by the ear. All the trips to the park, stores, bank and post office had been spent playing the games like "What's the first/last sound of the word", "Finish the word", "Tell me the word that starts with this or that sound", etc. There had to be a lot of effort from my part to teach Ivana to read in Russian since there was not too much exposure to the language in the every day life, except in the house and with a few Russian speaking friends and kids.

Then I decided to start sitting down with her for 20 minutes every day with this one book, that is very logically, step by step leads the child to start reading on his own. We started with reading the singles letters, moved to syllables, then to 3 letter words, one syllable words, 2-3 syllable words, combinations of words, short sentences, longer sentences, short stories, and finally to 40-50 word stories. We would first repeat the page that we'd read the day before, and then read a new page. And before we knew it, we were approaching the final pages of the book, and Ivana had acquired the most wonderful and useful skill in life, reading!

And that book was ALL we have been working with! There were no fridge magnets, Leap Frog materials, CD roms or flash cards. On the other hand, there were countless hours of reading (a lot of times the same book over and over again, especially when she was a toddler), playing speaking Russian, singing songs in Russian.

It is extremely important to me that our girls know my and my husband's cultures. Know what kind of childhood we had, meet and have the relationships with the family members that are overseas. I truly hope that one day they will thank me for passing on to them the knowledge of another language, for the ability to enjoy countless masterpieces in literature written in the original language, for being able to have a conversation with the grandparents and cousins, for making it a bit easier to feel like the citizens of the world and really know and appreciate other cultures.

Ivana learned her ABCs long time ago, and ever since she got the concept of the sounds that letters represent, she has been trying to read in English. She notices all the signs around her and stops to try to read them. I help her out a bit, since there are some letters that are written the same in both alphabets , but sound differently. She is reading all the brands of the cars, names of the streets, signs in the stores, titles of the books we sit down to read.

It just proves one more time that you don't have to have all those over 200 skills that the "educational professionals" are teaching kids in preschool and kindergarten. For some years, a Board of Education reading expert, Bernard Gallegos, has been putting together a package of the reading skills children need to learn in elementary school. At one point, Gallegos' list topped 500 elements. It has since been reduced to 273 over grades 1 through 8. I think Mr. Gallego was simply wasting his time!