Reading Progress

I'm pleased to report that Kwamai is making wonderful progress with reading. He has picked up lots and lots of sight words, but he is also rapidly improving with phonetic reading as well, which is a rather sudden light-switch-gone-on. The other day he was looking at the box of soy milk and said "va-nil-la. Oh yeah, vanilla!" We keep having this on-going debate where he insists I told him English is read right to left, but I'm changing my tune and then telling him to read left to right. His right-brainedness seems to presume there should be no difference -- it's all the same word, right -- so who cares if you say daer or read?

He has accomplished this learning on his own, I'd add. I've held off trying to drill him, realizing it is much easier to guide a moving learner than to entice a balking one. He loves, more and more, to get books at the library and sit around, well, reading them (or trying to). When he asks for a certain word to be read for him these days he is realizing that it goes quicker and smoother if he spells the word out loud to the adult at hand, and he also no longer stumbles over identifying letters as he did just a few months ago.

There is much to be said for the tenet that when a child is ready to learn something, it clicks in and takes off. I'm pleasantly surprised that it has happened at this young of an age for him.