Reading adventures

I'm so proud of my big girl today! Well, I'm proud of her every day, but I'm extra impressed at the moment. My sweet girl learned all of her letters and all of their sounds by the time she was 18 months old. She loves to learn and we had about two hours in the car every day to practice them - thank you Atlanta traffic!

Since she turned 3 and a half, I have sat down with her a handful of times to try sounding out words. She would sound them out, but just hasn't been super interested. Then she would start guessing instead of reading, so I got frustrated that she wasn't really trying and just stopped. Life is too short to be frustrated with my precious little ones. Plus, technically other kids don't learn to read until kindergarten, so why rush right?

I thought she was ready and felt like she was bored with other things, so we tried again. But the same thing happened, she started guessing and I decided I wasn't going to push it. Well, today she asked to get down the Leap Frog game from Laura. I obliged and told her we had to do it together because I didn't want to her to accidentally tear one of the cards. So little sister napped and we worked on three letter words. I am so proud because she did a FANTASTIC job! She read over half of the cards in the stack before getting tired!

Here is a short video of her working on "ix" words. This was the last card and I'll admit we were both a little tired, but I didn't think to record her before this one! And I accidentally cut it off when I got excited, but it is still cute!

I'm hoping this is the start of her learning to read and not just a fluke! After she learned "at" words, we read Pat the Cat. She was so excited to be able to read almost half the words. I think she will be really excited when she can read by herself and doesn't have to wait on mommy to finish _____ to be able to read to her. We will hopefully always do our after lunch and before bed reading times, but seeing her read by herself is going to be so incredible!