The Power of Words

 

I’ve had and shared some “struggles” I’ve had #RaisingReaders with my 6 year old son. However, recently I’ve been able to put things in perspective due to working with striving readers at work.

Not long ago my son was reading a book to me about twin sisters. In the story, one of the girls played the fiddle. I saw the word fiddle coming, and in my head, I was already planning how we were going to attack this word to figure it out. However, although he didn’t recognize it right away, he quickly figured it out.  Was I surprised? Yes. Why? Because fiddles don’t really come up in conversation in our household, so I didn’t think he had any idea what it was, and I didn’t think the context of the book was going to help him. Boy was I wrong…and it got me to thinking.

At work recently I was listening to a student read and we came to the word furniture. Now whereas I was prepared for fiddle to be an issue, I was not as prepared for furniture. Even after the initial stumble, I thought for sure when I pointed out context clues, like, “See, they mentioned chairs and a table, what could this word be?” that the child would find success, but no, that was not the case.

So after experiencing success with fiddle and struggle with furniture, I realized what the difference between the two could be, and I feel like this information from the Read Aloud Organization pretty much sums it up.

Do I think I’ve ever had a bedtime read with my kids that mentioned a fiddle? Nope. But we’ve done a LOT of bedtime read alouds over my 6 year old’s life, and as it says above, the number of words we’ve read, “add up fast”!

I am regularly amazed at the words both my children can read, and sometimes even the words they know the meaning of, and I attribute that largely to the fact that my husband or I read a book to them almost every night. Just that one task has exposed them to SO much, and I highly recommend it to you as well as you strive to #RaiseReaders.