Connor reading

Connor has been a little frustrated by reading lately...he can read very simple books and words, but only if they follow his known phonics practice. Otherwise, he gets angry and says the words aren't "right" and refuses to read them. I backed off of teaching it some - after all, not many three year olds can read at all, so not a huge rush to have him reading Chaucer - but came back to it with some total word concept stuff and fun word games. He found an old baby book in a box that we were emptying for Timmy, and decided to read the words. To my surprise, he could read a few at sight after only a few lessons in total word pattern work! It's odd what trips him up...sweatshirt comes out clear as a bell after only one reading, but rabbit still gives him trouble. And goat is fine, but make it coat and it trips him up. I can tell he's not just talking about the pictures though, because you can hear him talk ABOUT the picture and he would almost surely reference something being a picture of a girl or boy, without saying the word dress or coat if that were indeed what he was picking up on. This is only the second time he read this book since plucking it out of the box, and I thought it might make a handy expose of his skills. We banished the easy books he was reading for the time being, for fear of boring him or frustrating him with repetitious and phonics based learning.

I'm grateful we did all the work on letters and phonics, because it did give him a nice basis for sounding things out, but this language pattern stuff has really gotten him out of his rut, and gotten him excited about trying to read for himself again. Most importantly, he wants me to read more, so we're getting a good 30 mins of reading stories a day, if not more, and he's starting bringing books to me on a regular basis. Despite what Freakonomics has to say on the subject, reading to children has incalculable value in MY book (bad pun, shoot me later!)