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How I Taught My Son to Read Using Manicure Scissors
By Gwynne Spencer
Web Exclusive

When my son Matt was barely three and asked, "What does that word say, Mom?" I knew it was time to get out the manicure scissors and teach him to read.

First we stapled together 14 sheets of typing paper turned the long way. The "cover page" of this book said, "Matt's Wonderful Words" in big print. While Matt decorated the cover by tracing the letters with sniffy markers, I fetched a glue stick, some Scotch tape, a couple of magazines, and the manicure scissors.

Just as I sat down with these goodies, Matt said in shocked tones, "Mom, there aren't any words in this book!" I had been reading to him since the day he popped out, so this must have been horrifying to him.

"No, no yet, Matt. But soon it will be filled with Matt's Wonderful Words!" He beamed.

We sat side by side and looked through the magazine until he came to an ad and said, "Jell-O." I handed him the sharp, pointy scissors, and he cut out the word. Page after page, he scoured the magazine for words he knew so that he could use those dangerous and desirable manicure scissors.

After he had half a dozen words on the table, I asked, "How should we arrange this book? Should we put all the food words on one page and toy words on another page? Or should we put them in ABC order?"

He chose the latter, so at the top and bottom outside edge of each page I wrote Aa, Bb, and so on, in huge red letters. He waited eagerly to put his new wonderful words on the page. The first one he tried, he glued the "face" instead of the "back," so he ended up using the Scotch tape. He happily glued words onto the "mother pages," as he called them. That first session yielded eight words!

Next day, Matt asked the magic question again, and I again produced the coveted scissors from their secret hiding place. He found six words. After he glued them in, I suggested we read his book out loud. By the time he got to Dd, he began reading the letters and the words as I held my finger under each one. Then he used his own finger and we were off and running, plunging headlong into early literacy.

Each day, in addition to adding new and interesting words to the Wonderful Book, Matt and I read five or six "real" books. One day he said, "I want to say a story and you write it." So we did, writing one sentence to a page, in big red letters. Matt drew the pictures. I made the cover with fancy letters and sat with him in my lap, reading aloud while he pointed to each word. If he went in the wrong direction, I read it that way, and he quickly said, "Oh!" and started the line over on the left.

We made several homemade books, some of them four pages, some much longer. We wrote Vegetable, Vegetable, What Do You See? based on Bill Martin, Jr.'s classic Brown Bear Brown Bear, but we used pictures out of the Burpee catalog. We penned a story about the day Matt sliced open his finger on a bag at MacDonald's and almost had to get stitches, adding a Band-Aid at the back of our version of the Little Golden Book, Dr. Dan the Band-Aid Man.

Matt made up a story about a bear named Matt whose tummy got all the fur rubbed off, so he grew new fur using honey and fur seeds. He glued dill seeds on the page. We made a copy of that book for each grandmother, complete with seeds and autograph.

One day Matt said in frustration, "Mom, I can't read this!" and handed me The Rainbow Goblins, which he knew practically word for word.

"Of course not, Matt! They made the print too small." So we rewrote it, in big print, a one-sentence summary under each beloved picture of the greedy color-gobbling goblins, taping Matt's version over the too-small text. We doctored many of his favorite stories this way, always with suitable complaints about the silly old publishers making the print too small.

Then one day Matt opened Frog and Toad Are Friends. He stood up, clutching the book in both hands like a treasure map.

"Hey! I can read this!" he said--and he did, cover to cover. From then on, Matt would open a book to see if his inexperienced eyeballs could process the print; if not, he put the book back on the shelf.

We started "The Books I Have Read" list that day. Soon it was filled with dozens of stories, all with large print. The King Who Rained by Fred Gwynne was an all-time favorite, because it had my name on the cover as well as huge print and hilarious pictures.

Ever since, Matt has been a dangerous kid to take to a bookstore. He hated giving his beloved stories back to the library, so we bought many of them. In first grade, if things got boring, Matt just kept going with Ramona the Brave, which he had stashed in his desk. He never lost his early love of reading, and until he was ten, he never knew where I hid the manicure scissors.

Gwynne Spencer writes from her secret rebel base: a 100-year-old house in the middle of 20 acres near Colorado's Mancos River. Matt graduated from the University of Washington and is now a biochemist.