Good Example

Jack is in awe of his big brother. He just can’t get over the fact that Owen can read.  Jack has always loved being read to, and that now includes being read to by Owen.  Jack loves it, even it the stories aren’t  thrilling. 

From the beginning,Jack had always wanted to listen to every book that Owen has read, no matter how slow the going was. If Owen decides to read to me, Jack will interrupt any game he is playing and come curl up on the couch along with us.

When Owen was working on his first 100 book chart, Jack wanted one too.  So I made one with 40 squares, and let him begin with the book that Owen started to read with.  I thought he was too young, but decided to let him decide that.  Jack loved the idea of reading, but didn’t really like working on it.  He doesn’t know all his letters yet, and I play much fewer sound games with him than I did with Owen at this age.  He learned the sounds /s/ and /m/ and /a/ and then completely lost interest, scribbling all over his chart when Owen put a sticker on his own chart.

Since then, Jack has pretended to read lots and lots of things.  He pointed to random things (even if they didn’t have words written on them) and told me what they ‘said.’  At first, most of it was nonsense; he’d say, “that says, ‘ peanut butter’.” or something random like that didn’t have anything to do with the situation.  Later, he would say a word or sentence that had something to do with the item.  He might look at a Lego box  in Target and ‘read’, “Darth Vader’s ship.”  if it looked like that was what was inside. 

More recently, he has picked up books that Owen has finished reading, and pretend to read a page for himself.  He opens to a page, then very slowly says a sentence, “The….dog…..likes….. to…..”  then he squints his eyes, leans closer to the book, and finishes, “ddddddddiiiiiiiiigggggg……in…the….sssssssssssssand.” 
“Oh, the dog likes to dig in the sand!”  Then he looks around to see if anyone caught him in the act, and gives you a goofy grin if you are looking at him.

A week or two ago, Jack started asking again to read out of his book.  He gets SOOOO excited when I say I have time and jumps onto the couch like I am about to hand him a huge birthday present.  It makes me laugh every time.  I  figured this excitement would last for a few days like it did last time, but he shows no sign of stopping.  He always asks for a 2nd lesson (which I say no to.)  Yesterday his was out of his mind thrilled because he got to read his first “story” out of this book.  His story was,

See me eat. 

I have to admit that I was pretty proud of him too.

We do however, need to work on comprehension.  There is a picture that goes with each story (that I cover up until the story is read and ask Jack what he thinks will be in the picture.)  When I asked Jack about the picture for the “See me eat.” story, he said some random thing about someone looking in the water.  I am not sure what that was about (maybe he was thinking ‘sea’ instead of ‘see’?   Who knows?)

I am very curious to see how long his enthusiasm will last.