At bedtime, I read Vinny three books every night. Last night, I was reading him a book and his hand was obscuring one of the words. It was a book I'd read him a zillion times, but I was sure I knew what it said, so I didn't bother to move his hand.
Turns out that I knew what it meant, but I said a synonym of the actual word on the page. Vinny quickly corrected me with the proper word. I had to laugh that the person who can't yet read was correcting the one who can read.
He's really close to reading, but not quite there yet. He can read certain words, like "off," "stop," and "exit," and he can rattle off all the letters he sees on the page in sequence. We've been encouraging him to sound out words, and I think they're working on his reading in preschool too, but he doesn't quite have it yet. I think he will have it figured out very soon, though.
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4 comments:
How cool! My mom said I started reading about when I was Vinny's age, and I can't wait to teach my little on to read too! Except I am not sure how one teaches a kid to read in English; in Ukrainian you just read every letter, which seems so much easier! I guess I will have to study up :)
That's great! Memorizing your favorite books is actually an official pre-reading milestone, and so is having a few "sight words," so he is definitely on his way.
My favorites books for this stage were Frog and Toad stories. Simple words, complicated stories! Very funny.
ScienceGirl, there are English rules to sound out words, but they are actually retrofitted to the spellings of words. For example, the silent e at the end of the word making the vowel long (e.g., tape vs. tap). Originally, English was phonetic, but in the 1400s there was what's known in English linguistics as "The Great Vowel Shift." (You should look it up if you're curious.) After that, the pronunciations of words had changed so much that the spellings were no longer phonetic.
Teaching Baby Girl to read English may be a job for Hubby :)
Madeleine, I used to love those Frog and Toad books when I was a kid! I may actually have some of them somewhere in this house. I'll have to try and find them.
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