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?