Readin’ Malou

This week is the beginning of a reading period in Molli Malou’s class. She has one month to read 100 pages. (We have to enter her readings on a school intranet… is that normal in the US?)

Molli Malou’s reading level seems normal to a little above normal for her age — in two languages. I’d been worried that trying to keep her English reading at the same level as her Danish reading might cause some kind of cognitive dissonance that would turn her off reading. I mean, how do you teach a 7-year-old that sometimes “the” is pronounced the way we say in English, but sometimes as “tay,” which is the Danish pronunciation, and which means tea? How to you teach her Danish J sounds like English Y, and Danish Y sounds like English U, but sometimes English Y sounds like Danish I — which sounds like English E?

How do you teach her to tell just by looking at something whether it’s English or Danish, and which rules apply?

It’s confusing, and since I’m her only full-time English teacher (besides the television), it’s stuff I feel I need to know. So at a general parent-teacher meeting last week I pulled her teacher aside and asked what I should do, and she said, “whatever you’re doing. Molli Malou is doing just fine.”

A day or two later Molli Malou relieved me of my remaining apprehensions by looking up from a game she was playing on my phone and saying, “Daddy, should I tap the button that says ‘continue?'”

Anyway, we have to help her log these 100 pages, and up until tonight it’s been all Danish books. But I thought that on my reading nights with her it should remain in English and, based on my conversation with her teacher, I knew it was “legal” to log English books for her online. So I let her know we could read any of the favorite books from when she was little, since they would be easier to read than the bigger books I read to her now, and she selected “Are You My Mother?” by P.D. Eastman.

She read the whole goddam book to me. She knew what sounds to expect in English. It was astonishing. I mean it was amazing. It was also hilarious.

In case you don’t recall the plot, the story follows the adventures of a baby bird whose mother goes off to get him food just before he breaks out of his egg, so he spends most of the novel hopping around (he can’t fly) asking various animals and inanimate objects if they are his mother.

After he pops out of the egg, the story goes like this:

“Where is my mother?” he said.

He did not see her anywhere.

Molli Malou read the first line without any real problem. She took her time going into the second line.

“He d– d– …”

“Remember, honey, it’s an English I, not a Danish I.”

“He… he…”

“Sound it out.”

“He duh… eye… duh… HE DIED!”

She knew the story very well, of course, so she knew she was wrong, and she laughed uproariously. I joined her. Three pages later, a kitten is asked whether she’s the baby bird’s bother, and “The kittien just looked and looked. It did not say a thing.”

In Molli’s telling, the kitten “looked and looked…. IT DIED!”

In fact, many of the innocent animals in the narrative ended up dying soon after their introduction. We were giggling so loudly Trine says we were disrupting her nighttime story to Maddie.

And Molli Malou got through the whole thing. The first English story she has ever read.

I am just so proud and so excited.

And so determined to put password protection on my journals…

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She’s up to 68 pages already, so the 100 by October 14 don’t seem very intimidating. At this rate she’ll have over 100 in each language by the end of this weekend.