There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to read and some didn’t learn until second grade and in third grade, you’d be hard-pressed to know which ones were which.

This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.

Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.

I was one of the kids who didn’t learn to read until the 3rd grade. The only kid, as I was made aware at the time.

At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn’t know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started reading voraciously

Didn’t take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up ever since