Reading and Writing

My son and daughter have been making strides in both reading and writing since the beginning of the school year—big Green Giant type of strides.   Here’s the latest with each of them:

The Big Boy Reading Alone Update:  My son has gone from super beginner books ala “see spot run” to reading without a lot of assistance very recently.   He calls out things he reads while we’re in the car all the time.   He’s not afraid of long words, he just wants to know what something says.   He had reading books being sent home from school but within the last month he’s leaped forward and the books are all too easy for him as opposed to something he would struggle over.  

His sister got him a comic book (book, not paperback) at her book fair titled, “Dog Man”.  My son is attacking this book with both excitement and reading stamina.   Last night he was disappointed his sister was throwing a tantrum downstairs and didn’t get to hear him reading the book aloud to me because he wanted her to join in on the exciting story.

Tonight he did something he’s never done before—he read to himself alone.   I was working with his sister on her reading and I realized he was pages ahead and hadn’t skipped anything.   He wanted to comprehend the story, not just finish the assignment.   He asked me about a few words but that was it.    There were easy words, but there were also hard words to pronounce like, “mayor” and “reunited”.   I had to cut him off when he got to the end of the chapter.   He’s half-way through the book and must have read forty pages easily tonight.

The Tiny Girl Phonetic Spelling Chronicles:  My daughter loves to spell words and sound them out.   She doesn’t mind if she’s spelled it wrong, she just accepts the correct spelling when you tell her and factors it into her mental library.   She’s also good at reading and by that I mean she’s getting faster and faster at reading braille and sounding out the words she doesn’t know when she encounters them.    But the phonetic spelling is what’s getting me of late.

I can “see” braille, but I can’t recognize all the letters of the alphabet and lately my daughter has been learning more and more, “secret codes” which are shorthand versions of words.    She’s picking that up faster than we can even keep up.    So I’m never quite sure what she’s got in front of her when it’s braille.   The good thing is, she is.   She knows exactly what’s written.

For Valentine’s Day she had a heart come home with some strips of paper with braille sentences on them.   I didn’t know where they came from or who they were for.   Were they from her teachers to her?   Were they from her to us?  So I asked her.

She said aloud, “I like…mom, what does ‘certis’ spell?”   I didn’t know, I asked her what the rest of the sentence said.    She read more, saying, “because they are…what does, ‘cruchee’ spell?”   And at this point I was completely unhelpful because I didn’t know.   Then she figured it out exclaiming, “oh, I remember what I wrote: ‘I like carrots because they are crunchy’.”