Magical

Nidhi has started to read. It's truly magical.. the day your child picks up a book they've never read before and makes sense of it. She's always been very interested in books and alphabets. She learnt the phonetic sound entirely on her own. Sometime around the start of this year, she began getting curious about putting sounds together to make words and how to spell. I remember her trying to spell her friend Olivia's name = OLVA.

I bought a book, so that we would learn to read the 'right' way. We're about a third of our way through the book. While the book has given us a structure, I see, however, that Nidhi's reading of familiar books, draws from a combination of the following:

1. Her understanding of the story

2. Recollection of the words on each page

3. Her knowledge of spoken language structure

4. Alphabet/phonic recognition

Last week I got her one of those early readers from the library. But she seems to prefer her usual story books to "Ted in a red bed" (predictably, an easy read, but a nonsensical story). So, we returned that to the library and got several other regular books. I read the new stories to her a couple of times, and she's ready to read them herself.

The 'learning to read' book that I bought has a writing exercise at the end of each lesson. I have been skipping that so far. Well actually, we did the first few lessons - but a little differently! We traced the letter shapes on salt, instead of writing with a pencil. She enjoyed those, but it was getting messy at times. Maybe we ought to start those again.