My four-year-old son Jamie is experimenting his way through an interesting phase in his reading development. He already knows the alphabet and is starting to try and connect individual letters to words he knows.
It generally works pretty well for him with the books he knows, because the words he is spelling out correspond to the words he can say completely and knows from active memory of the stories. It can lead to some pretty amusing results when what he is spelling out doesn't exactly correspond to the word he thinks results from these letters.
There are two main bookshops in our local shopping center: Borders and Angus & Robertson. Jamie knows them simply as "the red bookshop" and "the green bookshop" respectively (based on the colours of their storefronts and banners).
While eating lunch together last week in front of the Angus & Robertson bookstore, Jamie decided to spell out the cover of his latest Pocoyo DVD, and then the Angus & Robertson sign. Here's what he decided the letters amounted to:
It's fabulous watching the little guy experiment and make his own connections! And as you can see from the video, it can be pretty funny, too.
I'm currently expanding Jamie's awareness of the alphabet by concentrating on the actual sounds the letters make and helping him to connect them to initial sound values for a variety of words (through a series of simple picture-based posters, which I will upload here on the blog at some stage). Our nightly reading time has also resulted in him building up a large number of basic sight-words, so he's in an interesting transitional stage in his reading development at the moment!
Oh, and parent's pride... If you didn't get enough of the little guy in the video above, here's a recent snap of him (and below that his 8-month-old younger sister Hannah) during a family picnic down on the waterfront near our home in Barwon Heads:
What can I say? Thank goodness they both take after their mother!
:-)
