Oh, the places he'll go!

 

I like to pat my blue rat on a mat.

It's the sweetest sentence in the world. Ten words that brought tears to my eyes.

Why? Cause my kid read them. By himself. Today. For the first time.

He will be six years old in a few weeks. And while I knew of course that eventually he would read, I still wondered how. When.

This is a child who gets so frustrated practicing letters on his homework he slams his pencil and wants to quit.

Suddenly, today, it's game on.

His teacher sends home weekly notes to the parents, telling us what's going on in the classroom. She has a list of sight words that she wants the kids to learn. I finally wrote them on index cards today and had Sawyer review them. He did pretty well, so I started making them into sentences.

And then I watched Sawyer sound them out. He's never done this before. I mean, he sounded out the hard consonant, then the vowel, then the other consonant. Correctly.

It seems like everyone I know has kids who started reading when they were four. Or younger. I couldn't help wonder when it would click for Sawyer. He was an early talker and I'd heard usually they're early readers, too. I started thinking Sage might end up reading before he did.

Thing is, he's a kid who would listen to us read for hours if he could. I couldn't wait for him to fall in love with reading the way I did as a child, to bury himself in a book and be transported. To hear him read to his baby brother.

But he never showed the slightest interest in doing it himself. Until today. I swear I heard the gears start turning in his brain. The best part? How proud and excited he was. His eyes lit up as he correctly read each word. We wrote sentences for an hour before dinner. And he wanted to do more after dinner.

A black cat sat on an orange bat.

I can see my purple hat on the green man.

I know he has a long way to go. It wasn't exactly literature we worked on. He still needs some prompting on some words.

It was simply the first step, a matter of him gaining confidence. I'm guessing my days of spelling stuff I don't want him to hear to David will come to an end pretty soon.

There's no stopping him now.