My Little Reader

Eli has really made leaps and bounds with his reading so far this school year.

When the year started, he was probably a bit behind where he should’ve been. But as I’ve posted before, it was important to us to let him move along at his own pace; encouraging him to progress but not forcing it down his throat like we found happened with Zach when he was in school during these early years. I was looking ahead to the end product—a child that would hopefully retain his natural curiosity and love for books, instead of what the schools left me with Zach: a child who’d rather do anything than learn or read a book for fun. (Praise the Lord that Zach, too, now reads for fun. I’m just sad that it took 2 1/2 years of deprogramming to get him there.)

Other homeschooling moms promised me it would pay off, that when Eli was ready, things would click. I was beginning to wonder if that was true, but over the past week, I’ve really seen evidence of this.

Reading time always consisted of me reading to him, or him reading to me. But the other day he asked if he could read to himself. Then he proceeded to take 3 books into the bathroom (typical man!) and read all three while he was in there. A quick oral quiz proved that he’d indeed read them and comprehended what he read.

Then Thursday, he totally cracked me up. He had to write sentences with a couple of his spelling words. They’re still super-easy because we’re only on week 3 of the new 2nd grade book, so one of the words he had to use was “and”. I was expecting something like, “I have a dog and a cat.” But Eli asked, “Mom, how do you spell ‘continued’?” So I jotted that word down for him.

His sentence: “And the rain continued to fall.” Think I might have a budding poet on my hands? 🙂