It’s happening! Today she read her first word totally by herself. We looked at each other immediately with huge smiles on our faces and let out a loud “woot-woot”, because we are rather loud in our family and because we both knew it was her first.

I had moved us from simply working on matching the symbols of letters to the sounds that they make using a keyword as a memory anchor to actually putting three sounds together at a time. This is a big transition for an emerging reader. It’s one thing to be able to identify that individual symbols represent individual sounds. But to grasp that you can blend those individual sounds into words can be a massive task. Sometimes it takes five exposures of direct modeling how to blend the sounds for a student to catch the concept, sometimes it can take over 100. But when it clicks, it’s a beautiful feeling for the reader. It’s like a whole new world opens up before them. My daughter’s face was beaming when what we had practiced many times all of a sudden made sense! So much so that she could apply that new concept to a whole new set of letters all on her own.

The word she blended on her own for the very first time was “cat.” Which is really special to me. You see, I already have a tattoo on the inside of my arm that reads  “dog.cat.boy.”  I get asked about it quite often because it’s a beautiful tattoo in a prominent place. I love the curiosity because it gives me an opportunity to tell the story of one of the first students I had the pleasure of teaching to read. The first story I remember him reading out loud to me was about a dog, a cat, and a boy. I will never forget the way we caught eyes and celebrated together the fact that he, as an 8th grader who had gone his whole school career trying and failing, had just read a whole page of words out loud, by himself, accurately. That moment changed my life.

So when my daughter’s first blended word was cat, my mind filled with memories, my eyes filled with tears, and my heart filled with gratitude. The tears were half out of exhaustion and half out of pride for my daughter’s hard work. And the gratitude was for the gift of this last decade of getting to see countless individuals, from Kevin to my own daughter, crack the code one little step at a time.