Toby is really steaming ahead with his reading and seems just as interested, if not more so in working out for himself how words are made up and how he would spell them as he is in reading.
A lot of his working out seems to be done in his head and out loud he is breaking up the spoken word into it's constituent sounds. He'll be in the middle of a computer game and I'll hear him doing this at the same time! It seems that multitasking gives him the headspace to do his thinking (I find the same for me, that concentrating too intensely on something just doesn't work).
He has gained in confidence and is now willing to show us in a very natural way that he is reading - this is the way Toby has always done things. He hasn't been prepared to 'do' them until he could do them well enough to satisfy himself. For example he showed no interest in drawing until he started being able to draw pictures that are recognisable and then he churned them out with gusto. He still shows no interest in writing, although he was quite into writing numbers for a while after he turned 4.
So he's given us these brief insights into how his reading is coming on....in the past week he read out the word 'offer' on a mcDonalds happy meal box, the word 'Look' on a magazine cover and 'free the slaves' on his computer game.
So this sudden spurt in his reading ability has got me thinking. Toby knew the names of all the letters before he was 4 and I could spell words out that he could type on the computer so that he could search for things that interested him on youtube. I was pretty sure atthat time that reading would quickly follow. But no, he hasn't shown any interest in being able to read for reading sake, only occassionally wanting to know what something says to help him navigate his way through the day. If I'd been having to write a yearly plan as per the new CSF bill then reading would have been part of it. I might have plugged away day after day trying to show a child who wasn't interested in being taught to read how to do so. I might have come up with all sorts of clever and sneaky ways to try to make reading seem fun that he'd have seen right through and felt patronised by.
It could have been a very time consuming and frustrating process for both of us and by the end of a year we may not be where we now are with a child exhuberantly and enthusiastically reading more and more words and learning and figuring out ever more about how words are constructed. Instead we might have turned him off the whole process and not had a child who was interested and engaged in being well on his way to literacy.
