My little T is reading!

My little T, who just turned 4 last month, has really started to read. There were some past incidents in which he read certain words but we figured they were flukes. Now, I've seen that he actually understands the process of sounding out and blending the beginning, medial and ending sounds. I don't figure he'll actually jump ahead to independent reading any time soon, although I suppose anything is possible. At least with B, there was a very long plateau period. To be completely honest, as much as my kids love books, they would much rather host elaborate birthday parties for their toys and play like that than focus on decoding a book yet. The interest is just really not there yet, but it will come.

Anyway, we had started playing this "game show game" with the Magnadoodle that was a word game. I had noticed that B was still sounding out very common words and sometimes stumbling over the illogical phonics in English. So I thought that he might be open to memorizing some common sight words like "was", "this", etc. I would write a word on the Magnadoodle and quiz him, followed by lots of loud and silly musical play when he got it right. It really did help some of those words stick in his head so that he wouldn't have to sound out words like "was" every time. When it was T's turn, I'd just ask him to spell the words because he only knew a few sight words.

One day, T brought the Magnadoodle to dh and wanted him to play that game with him. Dh wrote "cat" and T immediately declared "cat". Fair enough, that's a really common sight word. So dh proceeded to write "sat", "mat" and even "fat" (a word he's never seen before), with T correctly sounding out each word. Sometimes, we'd have to remind him to start on the left, or he would read "mat" as "tam". But he methodically and easily read, "muh-ah-tuh, muh-at, mat!". We wondered if he just had that "at" ending down due to some recent episode of "Between the Lions" or something.

Then, at the library the other day, when B was in art class, T was browsing through a Nick Jr magazine. He read, "hot", "cold" and "look". "Cold" was "kuh-oh-luh-duh, kuhohl-duh, cohl-duh, colduh!" For "look", he made 4 individual sounds, "luh, oo-oo-kuh, luh-ookuh, look!". When we got home, I pulled out some intermediate Bob books and found that he could read basically any short word as long as it followed simple phonics, e.g. "log", "mop", "rat", etc.

The really funny thing is that he doesn't know all the letter names or all their sounds yet but he can do the next step up. Like, sometimes I have to say "That's an "L" and then he says, "Oh... luh-ohg, log!" Or in the case of rat, he read it as "rot" because he's not sure what sound "a" makes. He did get tired (like B does) after a few words so he then lost interest. I still can't believe he's starting to read though! I don't know where that came from! My younger sister taught herself to read when she was 4, however. Maybe it has something to do with having an older sibling.