Completed Reading
My 5 year old daughter has been learning how to read. It’s such tough thing to learn because of all of the moving parts - letters, phonetics, and connecting it all into words. There is definitely a huge learning curve with reading and it’s something my daughter has been working really hard on.
It was frustrating for my daughter when she was first learning to read. She would sometimes scream and stop for the day because it was too hard. We wanted to make sure she understood that things will be hard at first and that you cannot give up. One thing that we tried to tell her to give her more confidence and resilience is that even some grownups don’t know how to read. She was surprised by this fact because she thought grownups know everything. My wife and I had to keep telling her that in fact, some kids know more about certain things than grownups. Something clicked in her after processing this for a few days and she kept going and going on her reading lessons after that.
Recently, she has been trying to read short books. Some of the words are difficult because between sounding out new and longer words or remembering which sight words say what, it was very taxing on her brain. She was chunking through this book and on the last page she was so frazzled so was showing some big feelings. My brother heard the commotion and tried to come out and help calm her down. She didn’t want to be calmed down and I was being tough on my daughter by saying that we would turn off the lesson and take a break (which is not what she wanted).
Eventually, my brother left and my daughter was still having big feelings. I feel like I know my daughter well enough and knew in this case she needed more tough love. I explained that if she could temper her big feelings, we could continue, but if she was having big feelings, we needed to stop. I also explained that big feelings that aren’t controlled can make a difficult situation harder. If she was freaking out about every word, she would not make much progress even if we continued and in fact, it might solidify the situation in her brain that hard things also come with big feelings (which pushes people to avoid hard things).
She needed a few moments to process all of her feelings and my advice. Eventually she apologized for the outbursts (and knows when an apology for an outburst is actually needed) and we chunked through the last page quickly. It was a silly story about some friends going to the beach and staying all day and night, but now that story is stuck in my memory of how my daughter fought to finish that book. I’m glad she had that experience and I’m glad I could help guide her to the finish.
