Reading News

Tonight Tyler read his first "chapter" book: Henry and Mudge and the Snowman Plan. Granted, the chapters are very short, but there were still 3 distinct chapters, and he read the entire book by himself. I only helped him with 2 words: "elbow" and "dachshund"!

Mamaw gave us a pile of Level 2 and 3 books a couple weeks ago. I had planned to put them away for later, but never got around to it and left them sitting on the steps instead. Tyler has been slowly picking through the pile and stashing them away in his room to read at night when he's supposed to be sleeping. This was one of those books, and he wanted to read it to Danielle before bed tonight. How could I refuse?

I shouldn't have been, but I was a little surprised he was able to read this with so little help from me. And his reading wasn't all choppy, either. He even read with inflection. Sometimes he would stop reading out loud and laugh because he was reading ahead silently. It is so amazing to watch our kids grow.

I feel like I've short changed Danielle a bit lately with all the posts about Tyler. She thinks she needs to keep up with Tyler, and she really wants to learn how to read. She's been working on writing her lower case letters better. This week we started "reading" with some of the first books Tyler brought home from kindergarten. Her memory is every bit as impressive as Tyler's and she quickly added "the" and "my" to the growing list of words she can spell and read. (Her preschool teacher is going to hate us this fall!)

(I linked to the book on Amazon so you can actually click on the book to see some of the pages of text. Click on "surprise me" and then use the arrows to scroll through a couple pages.)