The reading record says "Read well, tired." I have written some version of that in Alfie's book more times than I can count, and the truth under it is that reading is the last thing he wants to do at the end of a school day. He's six, in Year 1, and what he'd like is to be in the garden kicking a ball against the shed until it gets dark.
It's Tuesday 10 February, it has rained since Sunday, the garden is a swamp, and we still have the reading record. Here is what I've tried this year, in the order it failed.
What didn't work
The sticker chart lasted two days. Reading straight after school, when he's hungry and wound up, lasted a week. Reading at bedtime, when he's tired, was the one I held onto longest and was the worst of the lot, since he'd get to the second page and start narrating the pictures instead of the words. Racing Isla, who at nine reads like she's breathing, ended with Alfie in tears and Isla saying "I didn't even do anything." I don't compare them, much. I did at first, and I'm not proud of it. Isla was reading the cereal box at four. Alfie reads the pizza box, and that's fine.
His teacher said at parents' evening in November that what he needs is little and often, and anything with words on it counts. That's been the most useful sentence of the year.
What has
Ball before book. On a dry day he gets ten minutes in the garden before any book comes out, and on a wet day like today it's a lap of the through-lounge and ten star jumps in the hall. Then a snack, then the kitchen table, and then five minutes on the oven timer while the pasta cooks. When the timer goes off, we stop, even mid-sentence. It means I'm not the one calling time, the oven is.
Reading to Mabel. She sits on the arm of the sofa and he reads aloud to her, and since she never corrects him he takes more risks. He read a page about a stegosaurus to her last week without stopping once, and she went to sleep halfway through, which he took as a compliment.
Real print. He can read Parasaurolophus off a page without blinking, but "said" and "they" make him stop and frown. A dinosaur book from the library is a better reader than anything on the school list, so we go on Saturdays after Isla's swimming, and I let him choose, however many of them are the same book about the same triceratops. The charity shop on Otley Road had a dinosaur annual for £1.50 that he's read more than any of the proper reading books. A comic on a Saturday helps too, because the speech bubbles are short and the pictures give him a clue. Then there's the back of the cereal box, the instructions on the pizza box on fakeaway Friday, the Leeds United team line-up on Rob's phone, with Rob reading out the names while Alfie hunts for them on the screen. None of it is in the reading record, and all of it is reading.
What I've changed in myself
When he stalls on a word, my instinct is to say it for him. I'm better now. I count to five in my head and look out of the window, and he almost always gets there. Sometimes he gets there wrong, in which case we try again, and I've learned not to say "no" first. I say "hmm, have another look".
I don't know where he is against anyone else. He's on the Yellow band, and Blue is next, and there's a phonics check in June that the school mentions in every letter. His teacher isn't worried and I'm trying not to be. I'd rather have a boy who reads a bit every day and likes it than one who's being pushed up the bands and hates it.
I do write something in the record every night. Not "read well, tired" any more, or not every night. Last Thursday it said "Read 6 pages, 2 to the cat." On Sunday he read the whole of the back of a cereal box to Mabel in the voice of a newsreader, including the nutritional information. I wrote "Read well", left out "tired", and put a tick.
