Reading!

It has been incredibly interesting and fun for us to watch Julia learn to read. All of the sudden, she's seeing words everywhere. Billboards, the signage on trucks, our kitchen spice rack. She blurts out, "Old Bay," and I'm like what? Oh, you're just reading random things because you can now.

Pre-school did a good job teaching her the different sounds that letters make. In kindergarten, they have reinforced that while introducing "high frequency words" to memorize. In some ways, it's a bit tedious. They practice these high frequency words in little "books" made up of four sentences. "We like to play. He likes to play. The dog likes the ball. We like the dog." It was probably a tedious process when I learned to read to, but it's not how I remember it. I remember the very book, "Farm ABCs," which I still have (my mom may be considered a hoarder by some), when I feel like I figured it out and started reading. It seemed like an epiphany - I probably just forgot all those 4-sentence books that got me there.

In the fall, Julia was starting to sound out words here and there and made us realize that there are so many many exceptions to the reading rules she was learning. Why is the word "post" not pronounced "pahst," but "poste"? Why is "have" not pronounced like "save?" How do know if a word starts with "c" or "k"? So many things we just accept, but Julia is at a stage of actually thinking about reading. It's amazing to think how her brain is changing. We were at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia over the winter break and saw a cool presentation about the brain. They invited us to read words that were different color names, like black, blue, orange, etc. Only the words were printed in colors that did not match the word. For example, the word black might have been printed in orange ink. We were supposed to name the color of the word that they pointed to, but there was always a lag time because our brains our hardwired to read, so that we might have started, "Bla. . . I mean orange." Then they asked for a 5 or 6 year-old who was just starting to learn how to read to do the exercise and there was no lag time at all. These past few weeks, Julia has really gained steam in reading, so I think a month ago, she would have seen the colors first, the word second, but in a few weeks, I think she'll be like the rest of us readers and see the word first, the color second. I know that there are babies who can read from the infomercial, "Babies can Read!", but in the normal world, quite a milestone.

Anyway, here's a little clip of her reading one of her more advanced homework books.