Overnight Reader

Maddux learned to read FAST. For real!

I promise this is not just a case of parental amnesia. You know, where you forget how it was the first time around a particular milestone. "Surely Junior didn't walk so well so quickly." "No way was potty training this hard the first time." Nope...not the case this time. I really do remember when and how Eli came to be a reader. It developed slowly over his Kindergarten year, but at a very steady pace and it wasn't until summer or the start of 1st grade when he was really really reading.

Just this week it became quite obvious that Maddux is a reader. As in: now - this IS happening. At the beginning of the school year, she was reading through some BOB books, needing some prompting here or there, but mostly making it through the 3-letter words. But that was it. Then she progressed through more site words, but outside of that didn't yet grasp the concept of sounding things out and all. This week, she has started to really read when she and I go through a book together. Just the other day she sounded out the work 'funny': "f-uhhh-n. fun. nnnn-ee. funny?" Amazing. And then we came to the word 'alone' and she said, "ah-llll-ah-n. Oh wait, there is a bossy e!! Ahh-l-O-n?" That girl.....

Harry Potter

Just before Thanksgiving, Eli and I started reading the first Harry Potter books. I read them before the kids were born, but haven't see any of the movies since the third one, and haven't touched the books in as long as Maddux has been alive. Eli has become interested due to exposure from his older friends, so I thought it was a good time to start the awesome series.

From the get-go, Eli was REALLY into the book. I read about a chapter each night (sometimes two nights if they were longer chapters), and we always started the reading by reviewing what had just happened. Eli could always tell me most everything that happened the night before. We finished the book last Friday, and watched the movie on Saturday. Eli was ecstatic.

One of my favorite parts of this whole process was seeing Eli 'see' the book in his head as we read it. He'd look at the tiny pictures at the start of each chapter, but usually he would tell me that the picture didn't look at all like he thought that character should look. When he finally saw the movie, he went into great detail with me about how different the movie was from the book. For him, Fluffy and Fang looked totally not like he expected, and he imagined the Quiddich field to be more like a soccer field with one hoop at each end. As Eli told me about this, his eyes were so animated...he was truly engaged. We've already started the second book....Eli can't wait to find out what Harry did to Dudley over the summer.

A Whole New World

While Eli has been reading for about a year now, we've recently asked him to read out loud to us more often in the last few months. And the books we've been picking have been ones usually saved for US to read at bedtime. I love, love, love how well he reads and how it's opening his eyes in a new way. He pauses a little more often because I see him reading ahead now, and checking the sentence out before he verbalizes it. And it is my favorite thing when he chuckles at the words, context, or pictures. It's funny because these are books we've read as a family no less than two thousand times. But you'd think from his reaction he'd never seen the books before. And I think it's so cool that Eli can now read totally LONG and non-sensical books like Dr. Seuss that really test his reading ability. No sight-words there, just plain old sound-it-out nonsense! Here is a quick clip of him reading last night.