My Three Sons (And Their Books)

Benjamin is 2.  He is in the pre-reading stage.  He loves books – even though he still peels the plastic film off the covers of board books from the library!  (EEK!)  Really, though, he has such fun looking at the pictures, pointing to things that interest him, and telling me what he sees. This is called visual recognition. What a natural way to start reading and to feed his exploding vocabulary!  He also likes to sit with his brothers and his sister Naomi (4) as we read aloud together.

Micah is in kindergarten.  I felt sort of bad that I hadn’t done much this year to teach him how to read – other than reading aloud to him every day and piddling through “a little of this and a little of that.”  (I have always made phonics word cards for the kids to play games on the floor.  We had also used some of Dr. Maggie’s phonics readers.)   It’s just that three hurricanes, a house renovation and mommy’s pregnancy put a kink in our home school routine.  Not to worry, though.  What he really needed was that amount of time to be READY to read.  With the very basics of phonics under his belt already, he took off like a shot this spring with, of all things, The Ultimate Dick and Jane Storybook Collection which I bought at Sam’s Club.  OK, so it’s not strictly phonics, but he loves it, and he’s read over 250 pages already!  He has moved on to such classics as Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?   Micah loves to listen to me read aloud, sometimes while he sketches with his Magna-Doodle.  Yes, drawing is also a great aid to the reading process, as is music!  Both stretch the brain in sequencing and patterning.  Micah is learning to pick out simple songs on the piano, with the help from his older sister Rachel.

Andrew is in second grade.  He still prefers picture books (especially funny ones) but he is delving into chapter and non-fiction books, too.  At this more advanced “reading to learn” phase, I find it helpful to stay nearby so he can ask questions about what a word or concept means.  For example, he was reading a book about outer space recently and told me that “things weigh 50 pounds less on the moon than they do on earth.”  Huh?  What he had read was that if you weighed 60 pounds on earth, you would weigh 10 on the moon.  He had inferred that you just subtracted the weight, rather than dividing.  Actually, things on the moon weigh 1/6 what they do on earth, due to reduced gravity.  I highly recommend talking to your children about what they are reading in order to see what they understand.   Andrew often gives me lengthy oral narrations, which means that he recounts in his own words what he has been reading.  This is a good "Charlotte Mason style" language arts skill which helped prepare him for more original storytelling.   As a natural development from this increased independent reading and oral narration, he has recently become very enthusiastic about creative writing!  What really sparked his interest is seeing his sister Lydia (10) start to write adventure stories.  Now he has written several short but hilarious mystery stories of his own, such as "The Mystery of the Handprint on the Apple Tree"!  

Lately, I’ve been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to Andrew, Micah and Naomi.  This started after they watched an episode of the Little House series on ABC recently.  I figured I would jump on the interest while it was fresh.  First I brought home some of the simplified Little House chapter books and even some of the Little House picture books from the library.  They liked these well enough, so I decided to be brave and pull the “real thing” off of our own shelves.  I can usually read two chapters at a sitting.   A few nights  ago, we got so close to the end of the book, but Micah was sleepy and didn’t want to listen any longer.  Andrew snatched the book and finished it himself, and then jumped right into Little House on the Prairie the next day.  I’m not complaining!