by Nadya Williams (@NadyaWilliams81)
Almost every morning this academic year, once the final remains of breakfast have been cleared away, I sit on the couch with my six-year-old daughter to read. Or, to be more precise, we practice spelling out and reading simple words from the trusty old McGuffey reader, popular in the 19th century. (When our pastor and his family came over for dinner a while back, he saw the readers on a shelf and exclaimed: “I saw these in a museum once!”)
This is the third child I am teaching to read, and the formula with each one has been generally the same: one-on-one time that adds up to hours over the course of years, spent reading aloud as we practice increasingly more challenging syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs—until the child takes off in earnest and can do this unassisted. Of course, this one-on-one time is in addition to time spent reading aloud with the entire family, or just to one or both kids still at home. Those other read-alouds take at least an hour—more often closer to two and sometimes more—every day. In other words, I spend close to 1,000 hours each year just reading to or with my kids.
