More Reading

Princess keeps chipping away at breaking the reading code. She doesn't know she is, but I can see it.

She'll ask me as she's writing on her picture..."How do you spell 'handmade' again, Mum?" I can't remember how many times she's asked me (and I have it written on a piece of card near the art table for her as well), or how many times she has written it without asking.

But my job is to answer questions, and so I do.

Yesterday, she was studying her (rather disgusting lolly) for an extraordinary amount of time as we waited for a train, then she announced, "I think this says "Triple Power Push Pop" , and she was right.

Today she asked me to read to her, and so I did. I said I wanted to do some more tidying, but she argued that books were more important.

I said, "You are more important than the tidying". She agreed children are important, but books came next.

Later I was feeding Tombliboo and she asked if I would read some more. I said I would, or if she wanted she could read a book to Tombliboo. She wanted to read, and did very wel. She stopped a few times to ask what does "th" say, or some such thing...but mostly she read alone.

It wasn't a hard book (Maisy), but she did it, and she enjoyed it. She read "today" without sounding it out, and I was surprised. She didn't know how she knew it.

The bit that really amazed me was when she sounded out "delicious"...she was reading for meaning as well as sounding out every word. She read "di-eh-ll...delicious". I said, "You just read 'delicious'...that's a very big word- I'm going to faint!"

She said, "I don't see why- I only guessed- it had to say 'delicious'." And she was right, no other word beginning with d-e-l woudl have made sense in the sentence, but it was really cool.