reading...and how it's learned

I might have vaguely told this story before. If so, ah well, because here it vaguely comes again.

I hated learning to read. I remember it being a stressful time for both myself and my first teachers. I didn't get common, but then-difficult-for-me, words like 'the.' I also was easily confused when confronted with 'b' and 'p.' It wasn't until I was about halfway through my BA that I saw the video where a man was presenting to teachers the 'watch concept.' I really have no idea what the concept is called, but, basically, he holds up a wristwatch and asks, 'What's this?' 'A watch,' his audience dutifully responds. He turns the watch around, 'What's this?' 'A watch.' He keeps moving the watch around, asking the same question. Of course, it's always a watch. Then he holds up a shape: 'p.' 'What's this?' Ah, yes, it's a 'p' now, but when we flip it over, or around, it's also a 'd' and a 'b' and a 'q.' I don't know that it would have helped me to have someone point this out to me when I was five, but it might have been nice to know just how arbitrary letters are. I still occasionally mix up such letters when writing. I still, sometimes, write my 'S's backward and have to think for a moment, 'What's wrong with this?'

Ultimately, I came out fairly unscathed, I think. I love to read. I like to always have something on hand to read: books, magazines, blogs, newspapers, toothpaste tubes, graffiti. I'm a person who will bring a book or other reading material wherever she goes. Cardo's car seat pockets are stuffed with books. (Mine used to be too.) If I have a few moments of spare time to myself (ha!) and I don't have reading material on hand, I'm anxious.

I love to read.

Pic loves books. She loves to have them read to her. She loves to pore over them, taking in the pictures, making up her own stories to go along with them. She's pretty good at repeating a book to us once we've read it to her. I'll often read a book to her and then have her 'read' it back to me. I've recently started helping her make her own books.* But, how do we get to the next step?

Being as overly-educated as I am, with two degrees in Literature, I feel this pressure to be the parent of a child who reads right now. People ask me if she's reading yet or if I'm teaching her to read and then I'm filled with dread. I feel like a failure knowing that she's almost five and still doesn't read on her own. I know it is ridiculous for me to feel this way. (I know it, I know it, I know it.) It's just...the expectations. It's the stories that others I know share: My older sister was reading at four, my mom tells me. My friends were reading at four. And so on. As I said, Pic is almost five. I feel the ridiculous pressure.

Here's the thing: I have no idea how to teach a person to read. There are some who say that children should be taught the phonics approach. There are others who are for the whole language approach. There's the balanced literacy approach. There're probably more that I've never heard of.

I read to Pic constantly, or so it seems. We definitely reach and surpass that fifteen-minutes-a-day marker. She's getting much better at letter recognition and knowing their sounds (although I have to say, soft 'c,' hard 'c,' 'k' and 's' are presenting a bit of a challenge...but I'm just impressed that she's getting that). I'm working with her on sounding words out and recognizing/memorizing very common words like 'the' and 'and' (another although: this isn't so easy when there is no one standard way to write each letter). She doesn't have much patience for this, though, and I don't want to force it. I don't want her to become frustrated and give up. I don't want to lose my own patience and give up, or worse, speak sharply to her and make her associate reading with me being upset.

So, now that I've rambled for many, many words, I'm wondering: What did/do/will you do? What worked when you were learning to read, if you remember? If you've ever taught someone else to read, what helped?

I'd love some suggestions, if you have them, although I have to say, I may say, 'Interesting,' and file a suggestion away, unused. I know that not everyone learns the same way and that there won't be some panacea for all my woes. I know (or maybe just hope) that someone might advise me to just keep reading to her and set the rest of my worries aside for now.

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* At Poke's suggestion, I checked out (actually, I bought) How to Get Your Child to Love Reading by Esme Raji Codell, which I use as a fantastic resource for lists of children's books by subject. One of the things Codell suggests is 'taking dictation': have a child dictate a very short story to you, as you write out about a sentence per page and then have the child illustrate the story as you read each of the sentences s/he has composed. Pic's first story was a variation on Jack and the Beanstalk in which all the characters were female and Jack and the giant were friends.