Teaching "Dude"
Dole, Chris

CHRIS: My name is Chris and my literacy story is about my son Torren. It started when we was really little; I'd be working on the computer and he would crawl up and tap on the keyboard and so I got him his own computer and he started playing little preschool games and was teaching himself what the letters were. He was only about a year and a half when he was doing this. So I wanted him to learn how to do it right instead of teaching himself the wrong way to do things. So I got online and I did some research and I found a method that they used from the 50's called "The writing road to reading". The emphasis of that method of teaching someone how to read and to write was through the use of blends. He was about two years old when this started with the actual reading and writing part. We would sit there and his attention span is ten or fifteen minutes and it was really funny, he's got big blonde curls everywhere and he's in his little underwear, he didn't want to do school and put his clothes on so he had to sit in his underwear and we would, "What letter is this? That's A. What does A say? Aaaah." And we would practice all this stuff and in about six months we could put all of his blends together and, B and R always say BRR, they don't say BUH-ER and consequently at about two and a half years old he could read. I remember when my mom came to visit, we had moved in the meantime and we were living in Texas, we were originally from Oregon. My mom came to visit and I was telling her how well Torren could write and read and the writing part came a little later as motor control happened. He would really try and he would make his letters and they weren't very legible but that was alright. She had a hard time believing me that he could read as well as he did, I don't remember what book she was reading, but I said, "Go sit in grandma's lap and read to her." And he just started reading because he doesn't see the letters as individual sounds, he sees them as groups of sounds and he can just put them together in his head. I think a lot of that is because we started so early. So my literacy story is about my son and just watching his brain work and teaching him a fifty year old method that has been lost, when I went to find the book in the library it was in the basement and we had to go dig for it, they don't teach kids to write like that anymore and I think it's a shame because he can read anything he wants to read. He's in fifth grade now and reads on a college level and his teachers are all incredible impressed and I'm very proud of him and I contributed to that and that's a good thing.