Taipan & reading

Well, this is kind of a catch-up post. Over the past two-three months or so Taipan has been spending a lot of time on Starfall, which is a website that is geared toward early reading. At first he wanted to go there and play movies or have me read him stories from the pages. Then he really began navigating the site, and started exploring everything that was out there. From that site he started sounding out words, and was really showing interest in trying to figure out how to read words.

So now he's got some basics and some site words, though his interest in reading comes and goes. He hasn't actually been on starfall for a couple of weeks, but sometimes when we're out he does ask me to find words that he knows so he can read them. And he likes to read some of the words when we're reading books together.

I also bought the first two sets of BOB books, as I figured he'd be able to sound out a lot of the words in those books and enjoy reading them. On Saturday, before he got sick, he actually read one of them (Dot) on his own. For those note familiar with BOB books, it's very simple and maybe has ten different words. I think it's something like "Dot has a cat." "The cat has a hat." etc. But it was kinda cool to see him read it on his own.

It seems as if he's going to stick with what he knows right now, and progress in his own time - we'll leave that up to him. What's funny is that when he doesn't know a word, his standard guess is "put", but he says it in a really weird voice. It cracks me up. It's also interesting to watch him learn to read because he'll sometimes be able to sound out words like "little", but get stuck on something like "bag".

The most amazing thing is that he decided on his own that he was ready to start learning to read. We read a lot around here, but we didn't say "let's sit down and sound this word out" or "it's time for reading lessons". Kids will learn things when they're ready and when they have the need. Cool.