learning to read, loving to read
The Potato has been learning letters at his day-care for about the past six months, but only recently has he gotten to that point where he’s recognizing them everywhere he goes. “Look, Mommy, ‘B’!” he shouts at me every morning, when reading the Honey Nut Cheerios box. “‘H,’ Mommy, ‘H!’” It’s so much fun. He’s also very into writing words, although still not entirely sure why exactly the letters have to be written on the page in a certain order.
Yesterday, when I was driving him to school, he spent about 20 minutes telling me all the words that he was going to ‘practice spelling’ when he got home from school. ‘Car!’ ‘House!’ ‘Cat!’ ‘Elbow!’ It was freakin’ adorable.
I remember when the Bee had the same mental explosion of understanding that those squiggly lines that she saw everywhere actually meant something. It’s akin to the language explosion when they both learned to talk, and when she actually started to be able to read words, and would spend all of her time reading random things off of billboards and magazine covers. It’s really interesting to observe this development up close and personal, and has to be one of my absolute favorite things about parenting.
In other reading news, the Bee’s school has been having a contest this month–each class is challenged to read for a total of 3,000 minutes. She told me yesterday that her class is the first one in the school to crack the 3,000 minute mark–and the month’s not half over yet. The Bee’s contribution to this achievement? I just added it up–she’s contributed just over half of that, with about 1,600 minutes all to herself. The other day, I asked her if she wanted to do something with me, and she said very seriously, “Mom, I have to go read. I want to win this thing.”
I read something in the most recent Bookwomen where a mother was talking about having to stop her daughter from reading, in order to get her to do other homework for school. Until very recently, that seemed like a pretty theoretical problem to me. Now that Harry Potter has grabbed hold of my daughter’s brain, it seems a lot more likely.
