Parenting Month 63: Reading is fun

This past month both kids have been progressing in reading. The little one now recognizes upper and lower case letters on a pretty reliable basis. The next thing in line are colors. At the beginning of the month she only identified "purple". Now she knows "blue" "yellow" "red" "green" (which are the colors of her blocks that I carry around whenever we go out).

One of her favorite things to do is to read. There are books mommy reads, and books daddy reads. (unfortunately, she does not have a category of books big brother reads, or this would get much easier on us, he is certainly willing to take part on part of the work). Then, there are books she reads.  This tends to be a lot of fun to watch, and I could watch for hours (mommy would say that she would happily babble for hours as well if we would let her).  She also recognizes that my Kindle holds books, and can identify a few of her favorites that are currently loaded on it.

Reading in a coffeeshop. She can keep this up for a while, especially every night before bedtime.

The older one also reads regularly. For him, it is one of the things that he goes to for play. I remember being told that when kids learn to read, the parent workload drops tremendously because it means that kids can entertain themselves. This is the case with him as well (actually, once the little one gets going, she can be left for a while as well, until she decides she really needs an audience again).

One thing we are concerned about is that the reading is getting too easy, especially at school. There was a period where he was coming home saying that every class was too easy. Fortunately, they have been escalating the difficulty level for him and a couple of other kindergarten readers. And they have assigned staff time to do work with him (and the others) to check on comprehension (which has the effect of slowing them down). At the open house tonight, his teachers let us know that he has completed the first grade book series, and he is now on second grade reading material (at a school where the average second grader is a full year ahead of grade level).  He is probably aware that we are concerned that he is not being challenged by reading. This week he came home with a book from the school library (they have one book checked out each week) proclaiming to mommy "I got a difficult book for you." (and it turned out to be way too high level for him)

So, like other things, we are thinking about how mommy and daddy school will keep him progressing outside of school. Of course, daddy school looks a little fishy to mommy, as it involves reading graphic novels (Usagi Yojimbo) and talking about story lines (and activities that look suspiciously like playing LEGO and computer games). But we are in agreement that we don't want him to have the attitude of only doing things that are easy.