rfugal
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« on: June 26, 2017, 07:01:06 PM » |
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“Daddy, read to me.”
My daughter stood there, her face full of innocence, her eyes pleading, and her hand holding a familiar book by Dr. Seuss as she waited for me to respond. Ellie was six years old, but precocious; vivacious and articulate; and independent, yet a voracious devourer of my attention. For seven years her health and development had been my muse.
“Please daddy, read me a story.”
Not now, I thought. I’m studying. I’m trying to leave my mark on the world. I've set goals. I’ve got deadlines. I’m working. I'm busy.
“Why don’t you read that to your brother? Dad is busy,” seemed like a reasonable answer. So I said it.
Isn’t that why I taught her to read, I thought, to free myself of reading to her? Ellie was more than capable of reading the book she held out to me—she had read it at least a dozen times, and she would regularly read books ten times its length in an afternoon—but I had it all wrong. She enjoyed our story as much as she enjoyed the stories on the page. Before she learned to walk, she learned to maneuver her crawling self and a large board book across the room and into my lap.
That predilection is not precisely what I had planned for her. Sure, I wanted her to be literate—but when she was still crawling, in 2009, I had a different curriculum in mind. I am a numbers guy. I’m analytical—I crunch numbers for fun. You see, numbers are the vocabulary of mathematics—mathematics is a language, numbers are words, quantization is thought—and fluency in numbers was the gift I wanted to give her.
Ellie was not interested in my developmental psychology hacks for grocking number theory as a toddler. She was interested in stories. So in the four years from 2009 to 2013 I learned how how we teach children to read. Ellie didn’t learn to read without effort, and she was easily frustrated with fleeting forays into instruction. But she wanted to read and to be read to with a fiery passion.
I studied and tried practicing every method there is for teaching people to read. Nothing seemed to work, perhaps mostly because I refused to impose a lesson plan on Ellie that caused her frustration. I would not sacrifice her childhood for my ego. So I spent far more time simply reading to her than practicing any early literacy skills (reciting the alphabet, writing letters, identifying letter sounds, etc). Then in 2013 we made a breakthrough.
In June 2013 Ellie was reading fewer than 10 words—3 of which were her name, I, and a. She could not or would not sound out simple CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant, e.g. Cat) though she had been taught how, not just by me, but by an expensive preschool. If she’s able to pick up on it at this age, I thought, she would have done so by now. In August 2013 she was reading anything her heart desired, at better than 120 words per minute. The catalyst—what made all the difference—was Enhanced Choral Reading, though I would not name it that until three years later.
I was amazed at how quickly she learned to recognize new words. She was learning to fluently read a dozen new words a day with Enhanced Choral Reading. After learning to read thousands of words she began to understand and intuit the rules of phonemic decoding. In December 2013, at the age of 4, she read Phonics Pathways by Dolores G. Hiskes in its entirety, without assistance or cajoling. As a reader, it made sense to her. Enhanced Choral Reading quickly became only a memory.
In August 2015 I came to two realizations: at the age of 6 Ellie had read more books in 2 years than the majority of her peers will read from K to 12 (over 5 million words), and Ellie was casually reading faster than I was, at 300 words per minute. This made such an impression on me that I decided to take a second look at Enhanced Choral Reading. I took on the project of creating a mobile app around Enhanced Choral Reading, and I named it Sara.
I initially thought it might only benefit 1 in 10 children. Creating the app should be simple enough for an experienced developer, I thought, so it's still worth a try. I was not an experienced developer. I had dabbled in JavaScript, but I hadn’t written a single line of code in any other language. What I thought I needed was to recruit developers and build a startup team, or raise money to hire one. So I started a business plan and began my research to make a compelling pitch…
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