Sarah's Story

From the day Sarah was born her mother, Donna, started talking and singing with her every day even when she got no reaction from Sarah. Soon Sarah started looking towards her mother whenever she heard her mother's voice.

Both Sarah's parents talked to Sarah about many things. They talked to her about the birds flying outside including: what birds were, what they did and where they lived. Eight months later, Sarah's first word after Mom and Dad was "bird". Donna kept encouraging Sarah's language by labelling everything in sight. "This is a spoon", she would say as she handed it to Sarah. She believed that Sarah understood better if Sarah touched the object while she repeated the word. Together they identified everything in sight.

At ten months, once Sarah was sitting up on her own, Donna started reading to her several times a day. Sarah loved listening and enjoyed having her parent's undivided attention. Visiting family friends also read with her.

At eighteen months, Sarah began to take a book to bed with her. It started as a way to get her to settle down to sleep. It also strengthened Sarah's already strong attachment to books. She wanted a story read to her at night and would then "read" stories to her dolls in her crib in the morning. She woke up happier.

At twenty-two months, Sarah began memorizing her favourite books. She would surprise people by telling the stories to them using the pictures to help her remember the words.

By three, Sarah was on her way to being a "reader" through her own language investigations and discoveries. She could not do it alone without her parents first laying the ground work. They did not have formal training or even a college degree. What they did was talk and read with her every day.

Before Sarah reached school, she had learned the four basic areas for independent reading:

• associating oral sounds and ideas with written words
• finding meaning in written language
• anticipating what words would say before she heard or saw them
• valuing reading and writing as sources of entertainment and communication

Sarah's story is not unusual. She is not a "gifted" child; her parents are not extraordinary teachers. She is an "average" child whose parents took the time to introduce reading to her. What these parents did, you can do too.

Perhaps the most important indication of Sarah's future success in reading is that she feels excited about reading because she associates it with good family times.

Summarized Selection from: Making Your Child a Lifelong Reader, by Jacquelyn Gross. page 22-24.