I'm feeling grateful for books today. I just finished a great one: Rising Strong by Brené Brown. I've made it one of my goals during this Lenten season to read something--other than sports writing, ahem--every day.
The kids all love books in their own way. Tobin has had his nose in a book since around age five, it seems. Currently, he's tearing through Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series at a clip of about one book every three days. Lauren is on the other end of things but likes looking at her simple, patternistic pre-K readers. Our resident English teacher Matt--knowing she's relying on repetition and pictures for context--started asking her to identify the words that changed on each page ("The snow is on the house." "The snow is on the bike." "The snow is on the car.") She caught on quickly and even took it a step further: grabbing a pencil and paper, and proudly copying the words, page by page.
Evan, in first grade, is naturally somewhere in between. While he has always loved being read to and looking at books on his own, reading and writing have required him to work really hard. Because reading was difficult, he would often try to avoid or delay doing his nightly homework. (I guess it's a shame he doesn't have math homework yet, because he'd be all over that; he loves it!) But just in the last month, something has really clicked for him. He's reading faster and easier, and writing in his homework notebook much more confidently. Just this weekend, he grabbed The Cat in the Hat and reported, "During free reading in class today, I read this book for 15 minutes and I got to page 20! And there are 61 pages in this book!" He then went on to start at the beginning of the book and read a few pages, adorably using a bookmark to mark his place as he worked through the book at his own pace. He marveled to Matt, "Wow, it's like the more I read, the more I like it."
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