I guess we all pretty much saw this coming last year when we started seeing the boy memorizing books. Well, it looks like he is bound and determined to teach himself how to read (even though, I would prefer him to be completely potty trained- I've learned that my kids and I aren't always going to have the same ideas). Through a combination of memory and figuring out letter sounds, Caleb has been able to read ZOO, CALEB, MOMMY, DADDY, and SADIE. That's more than enough for any 3 and a half year old to master but not our little man. Sunday morning, he got up with Daddy and dug out his huge Curious George treasury book. Now he's memorized all the stories, almost entirely (gotta give the little guy a bit of a break since he probably has around 30 books memorized word for word, I think) but he has been working on pointing to each word and saying it as he "reads." While looking at the book with Daddy, he started asking Daddy to tell him what the words were and eventually he started to remember some of the words. Now he recognizes THE, IN, TO, FIREMAN, MONKEY, INTO (he figured that one out from seeing "in" and "to"), THEY, AND, FIRE, and possibly more. He's starting to connect that every time you see "the" it's THE. It's been exciting to watch and he seems to be more and more determined to figure it out.
Now if only I could get him that interested in the potty...
1 comment:
I would add GEORGE, LITTLE, CURIOUS, GOOD, BUT, WAS, BIG, and the phrase THE MAN WITH THE YELLOW HAT to the list of words that Caleb is starting to recognize.
While some of what he was "reading" may have been memorized, there was definitely some word recognition going on. For example, he noticed that "they" and "then" both contain the word "the".
He was also wrestling with the significance of punctuation. Apostrophes in contractions and possessives threw him a little bit, because all other punctuation came in between words but the 't' at the end of "didn't" or the 's' at the end of "George's" were obviously not separate words. (Random aside: I recently discovered that our software at work has the exact same problem with apostrophes.)
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