Nicholas and I have been trapped at home for the past two days as he battles a nasty virus. (Quick aside: as far as illnesses go this one isn't actually that bad since it really just consists of a fever, but that fever is high and uncomfortable for him and I am living in incredible anxiety at the idea of catching the virus myself, as fevers are the absolute worst for the baby--for myself I'd take a fever over vomiting, but vomiting doesn't hurt the baby while a fever really can. So any prayers you want to send that this virus skips over me and Cashew would be appreciated.)
Anyway, the upside of being stuck at home and it just being the two of us is that we've really spent some good quality time together. Much more, I'm ashamed to say, than I usually make time for. Yes, there has been plenty of time when he is up for no more than lying on the couch watching tv and I am doing dishes or laundry, etc., but when the Tylenol is being most effective we've played games (a babysitter he had last week and he played Trivial Pursuit, so that is what he insists on most, with me whispering the answers to him), worked on a fun sewing project that he is doing the planning of but I clearly will do most of the work for, had a lot of snuggle time (I know, bad for spreading germs, but the little boy is sick and needs snuggles to fall asleep and I'm the only one around to give them), and done some reading.
And it is this last point that the post is really about. He has made a big leap forward on his reading/pre-reading skills. I don't know if he made the leap in the last couple days or I just haven't been attentive enough to notice before, but sometime in the last few weeks he started actually sounding out words rather than sounding out a series of letters. I'm not sure if I can really explain the distinction in writing, but when he tried to sound out a word before he would make the sound of each letter but couldn't blend them together. So even if he had all the sounds correct, he couldn't jump from that to thinking of a word that sounded like that. But now when he sees a word he makes a guess as to what it is based on the letters involved.
Now, I hesitate to say that he is reading, because he only gets it right about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 times, even with only 2 and 3 letter words, but this is one of those cognitive leaps that just awes me. And I think it might be new because he seems a little taken with it to. I first noticed it in the bath last night when we were playing with his foam letters and so we played with them a long time and he seemed as excited as I was with the number of words he was getting right and how close he was on the others. And then both last night and today he kept stopping me when I was reading to try and read himself. I have promised him that as soon as he is well enough we will go to the library to get some beginning reader books because the Magic Treehouse books we are up to have words that have to be around a 4th grade reading level and he is at "See Spot run" and so was getting frustrated.
He is so close. It is Nicholas so this may have been the leap and he'll be reading for real later this week or there may be another key pivotal leap necessary and it may take him another year to reach it, but I am impressed nonetheless.
Seriously, I know everyone learns these things--from learning to walk to potty training to learning to read, but watching him go through the learning process of each has given me such respect for how hard these things are that we take for granted. Seriously, I'm realizing that all of my real accomplishments were in my first 5 years. Getting a Ph.D. is just having a good work ethic and reaping the benefits of reading my whole life. In terms of the actual cognitive work involved, it was nothing compared to learning to see words where once there were just a set of letters.
And so once again I am in awe of my little boy. And humbled.
No comments:
Post a Comment