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 Learning to read. Learning to read for an 8- or 9-year-old is easier than one might think. By the time a child is that age he has heard just about every word in the average person's vocabulary spoken countless times. The key is to recognize strings of letter combinations and to pronounce them. This is where phonics comes in. My father and I would sit at the kitchen table and I would start to spell out the word by speaking the first couple of letters. At that point he would guess the word and tell me how to pronounce it. He taught me certain combinations of letters usually had a certain sound connected to it. Th and Ph being the easiest but there are many others. Once we went through Dick and Jane we started the serious work. We had a weekly newspaper that was printed in Westfield. He had me read the news articles on the front page out loud. It was torture at first but after a couple of months it got easier. It's amazing how few words are actually used in a news article and once you learn them the rest becomes a lot easier. This actually served 2 purposes. It taught me how to read and I became my father's eyes. I became quite adept at painting a picture with words in my father's mind's eye. More on this later. Phonics is a wonderful tool. I learned how certain combinations of letters USUALLY sound. Unfortunately English is just full of silent letters and letters that can sound different in different contexts. That all came much later. For now we were only interested in the basics. Along with learning how to read Dad taught me enunciation was the key to verbal communication. How you enunciate a string of words can have a huge impact on their meaning. In my youth I was pretty good at reading aloud and speaking with the proper enunciation. That skill has now, for the most part, left me. I can barely complete a sentence without forgetting what I am going to say or stumbling over a word. In any event we made good progress all that first winter on the farm and by spring I could read well enough to understand and communicate a written newspaper article to my dad. In between reading and math lessons my mother worked with me on printing. Once you learn the alphabet printing is easy as the letters look the same printed by hand or printed in a book. Cursive was different. I struggled mightily with that and never developed an attractive cursive style of writing. My mother was of that generation that was taught cursive and her handwriting was beautiful. She had a cursive writing style that would have looked right at home on the Declaration of Independence. In any event I soldiered on all that first winter on the farm and by spring I could print legibly, write cursive that looked like a chicken walked across the page but was legible to me and I could read at a decent level. I mastered basic math by this time and when I say bacic math I mean very basic. I never became good at math and later failed algebra twice in high school. I could add a column of number up and do basic multiplication tables but fractions were still very difficult for me. Always were for that matter although later on I could do them. During that first winter Dad started getting a monthly newsletter in the mail from the veterans administration. It had more world news that the local newspaper and I would also read that aloud to my dad. Most of the stuff in that newsletter he had to explain to me as I had no concept of global politics or US politics for that matter. Global Geopolitics was not very high on the list of things I wanted to learn at that age but learn I did. So much for my learning to read write and do arithmetic. I never got completely caught up with other kids my age but that first winter got me to the point I could at least be functional in school with my classmates.