Oscar's New Activity...

... is READING!


I am one excited mama.


A few weeks ago, Oscar suddenly got very interested in spelling out his own C-V-C words. He wanted to go to our dry erase board and write list after list of rhyming words with me. He has been able to figure out how to spell things phonetically for probably around a year now, but it was laborious and leaned more towards encoding than decoding. A few weeks ago, however, something clicked and he could sound out/spell words very quickly.

Then Adam introduced him to the words "The" and "is", and suddenly, he was all about making his own sentences.

It has been so exciting watching his reading ability bloom like a rose! It's been a lot of fun guiding him along. I would say my educational style leans heavily towards Montessori and unschooling, so I have been very light-handed with formal education so far. Instead, I concentrate on reading LOTS of books with the kids, providing a rich learning environment, following their interests, and trying to introduce new concepts into our everyday conversation. I haven't been pushing Oscar to read, so it's really neat to watch him hit a sensitive period as far as reading goes and let him run with it.

As soon as I recognized he had hit a sensitive period, I made a bunch of magnetic words for the fridge so Oscar could make his own sentences. His current favorite movie is Ponyo, so I included a "Ponyo" tile. He thinks it's hilarious to put it in sentences.

Pro-tip: don't use Crayola markers because any contact with water will make the words melt away!

We borrowed the first couple sets of BOB books from the library, and are working our way through the series. They are extremely basic mini-stories that beginner readers can read all by themselves, which is great for getting kids to identify themselves as readers. I asked him the other day, "Oscar, do you like BOB books?" "I love Bob books," he replied.

One morning last week, Oscar got up and immediately sat down with paper and markers. I thought he was drawing mazes (another obsession of his at the  moment), but he was actually writing his first essay! A whole pageful of a story about Great Sleeping Bear. There was tons of misspellings, and not a single space between words, but he's writing! I'd take a picture, but I should have published this post a week ago already, so I'm going to wrap this up here. We've got a new set of BOB books to work on.