Saturday, August 25, 2007

Yes, folks, he IS reading!

Our ABA therapist, Becca, came up from a decent session this morning and gave me an in-depth report about the fact that Joey is reading. Not on a sixth-grade level or anything, but definitely reading- three-letter words no problem, some longer ones. We think this is pretty darn cool. I was reading pretty good by his age, and so was my husband, but neither of us had any language issues.

This evening, I pulled out a new book for him to look at. It was about Cars, to catch his interest, but not one he had seen much of. I had read it to them once, but bedtime storytime is not an activity that usually including paying attention to teh mom reading a story, so I wasn't too concerned about him memorizing the thing from one reading.

I am not a teacher, and I know very little about how young children read or learn to read. I know there are two ways to read, sight reading (recognizing words on sight, rather than sounding them out) and phonetic reading (sounding out the words). In reading our new book together, Joey clearly has some words by sight (like "the" and "and" and "car"). Words he didn't know by sight, we worked on sounding out, and he tried sounding out. As far as I know, this is a normal way to read. What I found interesting was the attempts at sounding out. Joey is very familiar with letters and the sounds they make, However, he often made the sound for a similar letter, rather than the letter he was looking at. For example, looking at the word "slowly", he would try it as "slooty" or "stewly" or even "stowly". The inconsistancy of it, and the use of similar letters, was kind of odd to me.

But he got through! We read the whole book, and he was SO PROUD, and I was so proud of him! It was the coolest thing ever! When he really catches on to this, we'll have a another visual avenue of communication with Joey- and he'll have a new avenue for communicating with us! How cool is that?

12 comments:

VAB said...

Infinitely cool!

The thing about the written word, which is different from the spoken word, is that it stays the same, so you can go back and reference it over and over again. That's a wonderful tool to have.

I volunteered as a reading coach in my sons school last year. The thing with trying it with similar but different letters was absolutely standard. I don't know why kids do that, but I can tell you that it is very common. Maybe it's a hybrid between phonetic and sight recognition.

In any case. Congrats! You both deserve to be very proud.

Maddy said...

You are well on the way. Good for you.
Best wishes

J said...

Very exciting stuff!

Ange said...

Very exciting! Bubba alternates between decoding and sight words, but has difficulty alternating the methods. Like if he knows many words by sight and then has to decode the next word, he really struggles with decoding, but if he is decoding a lot of the words and gets to a word he usually knows by sight (even 'and' or 'the'), he tries to decode it and often can't. It use to confuse me how he knew words like "concrete" and "c" and "asphalt" and various dinosaur and cloud names but not "this" and "that". I get it now though! Bubba also uses illustrations to help him shape the words. Thank goodness for the nonfiction transportation, weather, and dino illustrated books at the library!

Enjoy reading!

Niksmom said...

OMG...WAY COOL!!! That is an exciting development that will open up whole new worlds for all of you! Niksmom is doin' the happy dance over here!

bigwhitehat said...

Outstanding.

kristina said...

Cool? More like great, stupendous, totally exciting to the max (sorry, a little antiquated high school vernacular there---my enthusiasm!).

Club 166 said...

Most Excellent!!

Buddy Boy has taken a distinct liking to a couple of "mini-encyclopedia" type books that one of my (ADHD) brothers got him. We think it's because the book covers soo many cool subjects (machines, electricity, motion, etc.), but also that it is broken down into little 2 page vignettes, which perfectly fit his attention span.

Joe

p.s. my verification word is "mupuu". I wonder what that means?

Unknown said...

Great. I know that my 10 yo boy still struggles with the written language, and we cheat a little and assist him with audio books. This means he has been able to enjoy all the harry potter books, Lord of the Rings, man of the classic books of my youth. And often follows along in a paper version to help him.

Maya M said...

"Book is a window to the world."
Congratulations to Joey for opening the window!

mumkeepingsane said...

Fabulous!

Patrick isn't reading, but when his older brother is trying to read he often guesses a word that looks difficult, and often ends up with different variations before getting the proper word.

Mary P Jones (MPJ) said...

Yay! That's great! Reading opens up a whole new world...