Ready 2 Read

Go here, Montana Momoirs, read this. Great information for parents with preschoolers.

Princess has always been interested in reading. We’ve been reading to her since birth and lately she’s really taken an interest in writing. She has been able to write her name, or at least two of the four letters in her name, for quite some time. A couple months ago someone helped her practice the other letters and bam, all of the sudden she can sign her name without any help and it’s completely legible.

As I was reading the above post I ticked off all the items on the list. We do all of those things. I’m going to take this opportunity to pat myself on the back. We also have the advantage of a retired schoolteacher spending a couple hours with us almost every day. Nana has taken Princess’ interest in reading and writing and began to foster it.

Flower is another story. Once again, just another example of how different two children made from the same DNA can be. We tried to read to Flower from the beginning, but she wasn’t really interested. When she was old enough to move around on her own she would grab at the book and try to wrestle it out of your hands. She made reading bedtime stories very, very challenging.

The last six months have been different so I have hope. Flower finally started showing interest in reading stories so we made them part of her bedtime routine again. Now she looks forward to stories and has her favorite books. It amazes me that she knows the names of her favorite books when all this time I was sure she wasn’t paying attention.

Recently Flower has taken to reading to her daddy or me. Some nights when we snuggle into the chair in her room for stories she tears the book out of our hands and gets upset if we try to read the story to her. She babbles some words and turns the pages for a while before she will hand the book over to us. She also started counting, or at least rattling off numbers. She’s fairly reliable with 1, 2, 3….although she does not understand the concept of counting. Then she points to items and throws out random numbers. I suppose she’ll figure it out some day.