The Only Thing That Stays The Same Is That Things Change
Jaimie on Mar 3rd 2008
Since my accidental discovery that CJ can read some words, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own childhood. It is amazing to me how much things have changed in the past 30 years.
I also started reading at three, although, according to my mother, I was reading a little bit more fluently than CJ is right now. But my mother also didn’t notice I could read until one day I asked her why a word in a book we were reading was spelled wrong. (It was a dialect-type thing). Whoops! Hee hee. I was an interesting little kid.
But that wasn’t what I’ve been thinking about. When I was five and started kindergarten, I had been reading for about two years, so my parents had moved on from just sight reading to actually teaching me to sound things out. Well, when I was in kindergarten, I was treated like a total freak. By the teachers. In fact, I still remember how I felt. Instead of it being a good thing that I could read, the teachers acted like I was a weirdo and a freak and I often was sat over on the side during different parts of the day and given a pencil with a holding triangle thing on it to practice writing instead of participating.
In kindergarten. It stunk. I threw out a lot of pencil triangles in protest.
My parents didn’t put up with this - they fought the school about how I was treated and eventually we moved to an entirely different town so I could go to a better school that wasn’t so messed up.
Now, in schools, it seems like kindergarteners are generally expected to be able to read - if not when they start, by the time they are done. It is a little more “school” than I remember kindergarten being. I still have more than a year before CJ starts kindergarten - he’ll be in preschool again next year - and I hope by then, he’s ready. I wonder how to find out what he needs to know to be ready. Well, I expect his preschool will clue me in. Nice side benefit of having him attend a preschool in the public school system.
It is still pretty nifty that he’s started reading. And knowing my mom also didn’t notice when I started reading made me feel a little better. 
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