Learning to Read

loving those books from an early age

Mal has always loved, loved, loved being read to.  He is a books and letter kid.  He is drawn to anything to do with letters.  His favorite TV show is Wordworld (he had no interest in TV until he saw this show at about 15 months old).  He plays "letters" (we have a ton of letters that he just likes to play with.  He cooks with them, scoops them up in the truck, spells out words with them).  He begged me to buy him foam letters for the bathtub.  He has never begged me to buy anything before this.  He has little interest in painting at school, but Wednesday, they had foam letter brushes and he could not get enough.  He currently loves to watch the signing time dvd's with the girls in the morning.  There are 10 of them that we own.  He only wants to watch the alphabet one and practices his signing letters all the time.  The boy just loves letters.  I can't figure out what it is.

Mal has known all of his letters for quite some time, both lower and upper case (although sometimes he gets tripped up on fancy fonts in books). He also knows what sound all the letters make...and thanks to PBS and Wordworld, he knows lots of letter combination sounds, like "oo" and "st" and "sh" (I am sure there is a technical terms for this).  He thinks he can read since he reads stories to his sisters a lot.  I would guess that he has 60-70 percent of his books memorized.  I like to mess with him and change words slightly sometimes.  He always corrects me.

A few months ago, we started sounding out words.  When he first started doing it, I was frankly blown away (I think I cried actually...it seemed like such a big kid thing to do and reading seems like this really big kid milestone).  I am his mom, so I am easily impressed by him, but I thought it was pretty neat for a two year old to sound out words.  What I quickly discovered though is that sounding out letters is one thing.  Stringing them together is a whole other concept all together.

Tonight though, he was doing it.  He was really trying to do it at least.  We were reading a very simple book with just pictures and then the word.  The top half of the book just had the word written and no picture.  You are supposed to match them up.  While trying to match up the word with the picture, Mal was sounding out each word to see if it was the right word.  What was really amazing is that he was asking me things like what letters sound like depending on the position or which of the two "c" sounds (ssss or ka) he should use when he sees the word cat.  He noticed that cat and car were very similar words.  Then we got to the word "house" and I could not even do an explanation justice.  the "ou" sound and silent "e"...and then I thought...how is he EVER going to learn to read.  My amazement at his comprehension quickly turned to anxiety about explaining our completely overly complicated language to him.

Really, how is it that kids learn to read.  It makes no sense.   I think maybe I'll stick to learning signs with him.