Ben can read!!!!

I could not be prouder of my sweet Ben lately. I have always been so impressed with how smart the little booger is (of course… I’m his mom!) However, what he has been doing with his reading lately has me simply FLOORED!

By his 3rd birthday Ben could recognize all of his letters and the sounds that they make. We worked with him at home (mostly with alphabet puzzles and his letter magnets) and he did lots of letter activities at his preschool. What helped him the most with his phonics was this video:

After watching this a few times, he was singing “the A says ah, the A says ah, every letter makes a sound, the A says ah!” (A note of warning: it is IMPOSSIBLE to get this song out of your head.)

For Christmas last year, he got the second DVD in the series:

This video taught him about building words and smashing sounds together. We would try to get him to sound out words, but he was not interested. It was much more fun to just have Mommy or Daddy read book after book (after book, after book, after book…)

This past Spring, I heard about a few friends who were using “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” with their children. You can read about it here. I ordered the book and Ben and I worked on it together. We did Lesson 1, and he LOVED it! We followed up with Lesson 2 and he was doing great. He loved the “games” where he would have to “say it fast”! A day or two later he asked to work on reading again so we did Lesson 3. We were right on track to complete Lessons 4-100 when our precious Noah decided to join us! The book of reading lessons has been sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, for the past SEVEN months. There have been a number of times that I’ve thought that I really need to carve some time out to do those lessons with Ben again, but just recently I learned that he could do this:

I guess my work here is done. In all seriousness, I can not take any credit for this. It's like he just woke up one day and reading clicked. I have no idea when or where he learned all the sight words. We actually got him some sight word books right after his birthday. I think it was a set of 10 books with 4 or 5 words featured in each book. I showed him the set when they came in and he proceeded to flip through the title pages and read all of the sight words to me. ALL of them. Again.... what? when? how? Oh, this child. I'm not really sure what to do with him next. He can read and sort laundry. I think he's ready to take on the world. ;)