please don't learn to read just yet ...

I now have one child who is completely functionally literate. Aged 6. Which is really late if you subscribe to the asian norms. She reads signs, newspaper headings, over my shoulder while I'm reading to them (no more skimming now!), and has taken to filling in forms. I was most gratified to see on the latest form she filled in that her hobbies are cello and school, favourite music is concerts and best singer is her brother. The happiest moment was her birthday and her 'greatest' were Mummy and Daddy, naturally she dreams of princess (hasn't mastered writing plural yet, so I'm not sure if she dreams of being a princess or just of princesses in general). Now that she's got English done and dusted (at least to a level that is way above the rest of her class - but she is one of the eldest) she's focusing on writing Chinese. Unprompted, with an astounding enthusiasm ... she swipes my character practising books and completes them, assuming they are for her.


I have a 4.5 year old barking at her heels. He is desperate to read. He's fully aware of all the secrets and mysteries that can be unlocked by deciphering the code of reading. He is an aural child though. And just in the same way that it's taken him all of 4 years to work out the colours and get the names right (and green and red, yellow and blue still often get confused, he's been tested and apparently he's not colour blind it's just naming - phew), I suspect it's going to take him a little longer to get the letters. And in a funny way I want it to stay that way for a little while longer. Of course every mother is ambitious for her children - some more than others - I've been following some blogs by very ambitious mothers who are implementing the Shichida methodology (here is an overview - the official site is only in Japanese) and the Doman method. I find that all a little scary. Of course the proponents all say that it was fabulous that they could read at age 2 or less, (this has been around since the 50's) and I think I already blogged the local KinderU YouTube video of a very wee mite reading flash cards. But I really like my sole remaining illiterate child.
What do I love? I love the fact that he is the only one left in our family who truly appreciates illustrations. And kids books these days have the most fantastic illustrations. I love the fact that he is looking at what the pictures are telling and 'reading' that and anticipating what is coming. Or even (like in a book like Handa's surprise - my all time favourite) - he knows that the story that is happening is so absolutely not the story that is being read (isn't that such an important life lesson?). He is learning to read the expressions on the faces of the people in the story, and questioning why they look sad or glad or bad or mad. And in doing that he's learning to read the expressions of people around him, and can very quickly in a social setting pick up on other's emotions. Something my highly literate daughter is quite bad at.
He's cuddling up and allowing the language and metre of the words to roll over him, to catch the melody and beat. She's assimilating the fact that 'know' has a silent 'k' and the 'o' is the letter name and not the letter sound.
It is a very magical time now. And he's become the story teller. With wonderfully tall tales. She is writing little picture books with elaborate drawings and funny texts - but she is limited by what she can spell and by the slower speed of her writing. And with his little violin he can put his imaginings to the most awful and yet wonderful sounds. She is being limited by the tunes written in her book and the short available time for practising.
He has his first formal violin lesson tomorrow. I hope he can be spared the learning of reading music for a little while, as I'm sparing him the reading of words and that we can exist in this fabulous mythical world of aural tradition, for just a little while longer.