Our son is growing fast, but we are the ones who need lessons to help him learn to read | Seamas O'Reilly
"Why doesn't daddy pick me up?" my son asked his mother. I had dropped him off, so he was confused. Once, last week, she had told him, "We'll be here at home time," to dissuade him from feeling homesick. Unbeknownst to us, he took this at face value and thinks that one of us who delivers it in the morning sits still in the playground for six hours until home time.
I guess my son is growing up so fast, I sometimes forget he's still a child, an effect that only got worse with the arrival of his sister. When we left for the maternity ward, it was a rosy-skinned baby. When we returned, eyes recalibrated to the scale of a newborn, we might as well have faced a middle-aged man with back problems and a forklift driving certificate.
>To be honest, it's growing really fast and nowhere more than in the language. A typical four-year-old has a vocabulary of 2,000 words, and every day they amaze us with their growing fluency in conversation, which is what makes their first steps into the world of reading so shocking.
He is so sure of himself in speaking that I guess I hadn't yet thought about the true mental achievement of literacy, which is hard enough to make your head spin. Taking millions of combinations of a few dozen hieroglyphs and translating them into meaning is such a bizarrely difficult task that it's hard to believe any of us have done it. The fact that he's learning phonics, a technique they standardized long after I finished elementary school, further hampers my ability to take on this task.
I used to laugh at my father when he complained that the teaching had changed since his time. An engineer by trade, he was an adept mathematician, but found himself unable to teach us his methods as he learned math in the 1950s when Irish children learned long division with, I guess, squares, rosaries and mysterious orbs. This was before textbooks and rough numbers were scarce, so local fishermen caught large numbers each morning for children to watch. A priest would bless them, then shout other numbers with which you would divide them, and you would chisel your answer on a piece of sheep's skull. The kid who got the answer right would win a week's worth of bone meal.
I rolled my eyes at my dad's frustration and yet here I am, all also adrift, mispronouncing letters. I start by saying "Ah, buh, cuh", before my son corrects me. It's important not to give these phonemes a long tail, he says, refining them to "a-, b-, k-". I welcome the fact that he calls them "momeems", but not much.
We practice every night with difficult words on the refrigerator, read his special books and let's eclair for breakfast before dropping him off at the school gates, marveling again at his obvious genius.
'Remember. You stay here, Dad, he says, and I settle in for six long hours.
Did you hear Mammy die? by Séamas O'Reilly is available now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Grab a copy from guardianbookshop for £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
"Why doesn't daddy pick me up?" my son asked his mother. I had dropped him off, so he was confused. Once, last week, she had told him, "We'll be here at home time," to dissuade him from feeling homesick. Unbeknownst to us, he took this at face value and thinks that one of us who delivers it in the morning sits still in the playground for six hours until home time.
I guess my son is growing up so fast, I sometimes forget he's still a child, an effect that only got worse with the arrival of his sister. When we left for the maternity ward, it was a rosy-skinned baby. When we returned, eyes recalibrated to the scale of a newborn, we might as well have faced a middle-aged man with back problems and a forklift driving certificate.
>To be honest, it's growing really fast and nowhere more than in the language. A typical four-year-old has a vocabulary of 2,000 words, and every day they amaze us with their growing fluency in conversation, which is what makes their first steps into the world of reading so shocking.
He is so sure of himself in speaking that I guess I hadn't yet thought about the true mental achievement of literacy, which is hard enough to make your head spin. Taking millions of combinations of a few dozen hieroglyphs and translating them into meaning is such a bizarrely difficult task that it's hard to believe any of us have done it. The fact that he's learning phonics, a technique they standardized long after I finished elementary school, further hampers my ability to take on this task.
I used to laugh at my father when he complained that the teaching had changed since his time. An engineer by trade, he was an adept mathematician, but found himself unable to teach us his methods as he learned math in the 1950s when Irish children learned long division with, I guess, squares, rosaries and mysterious orbs. This was before textbooks and rough numbers were scarce, so local fishermen caught large numbers each morning for children to watch. A priest would bless them, then shout other numbers with which you would divide them, and you would chisel your answer on a piece of sheep's skull. The kid who got the answer right would win a week's worth of bone meal.
I rolled my eyes at my dad's frustration and yet here I am, all also adrift, mispronouncing letters. I start by saying "Ah, buh, cuh", before my son corrects me. It's important not to give these phonemes a long tail, he says, refining them to "a-, b-, k-". I welcome the fact that he calls them "momeems", but not much.
We practice every night with difficult words on the refrigerator, read his special books and let's eclair for breakfast before dropping him off at the school gates, marveling again at his obvious genius.
'Remember. You stay here, Dad, he says, and I settle in for six long hours.
Did you hear Mammy die? by Séamas O'Reilly is available now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Grab a copy from guardianbookshop for £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
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