how reading happens

This is from the endlessly-fascinating-stuff files. I've been observing Zoo Boy's reading-readiness development over the past year with great interest. Today he had a pretty big step forward, that I happened to think to capture on film.

J learned to read on his own by the time he was four years old. He was obsessed with letters from as early as 18-months (prior to that he was obsessed with shapes, and knew all his shapes -- including the less common ones like decahedron -- by the time he was 2 years). He would come to us with puzzle letters and want to know the names, and all he needed was to be told once, then he'd carry them around repeating the name over and over again. He had figured out that letters make up words by his 3rd birthday and was on the fast track to learning to read, when we accidentally stumbled across Between The Lions, a PBS show primarily about reading. The show distracted him with phonics and he spent the next year fiddling around with that instead of forging forward with his decoding skills. Just before his 4th birthday, he pulled it all together, and presto, was reading. At a very advanced level. Decoding at least -- he could pick up the NY times and read it aloud, quite accurately, but of course he didn't have the comprehension for that (though it scared the wits out of many relatives, who we had not warned about this ability of his, when he'd pick up the paper at their house and start flawlessly reading the headlines). We've been working on filling in the comprehension piece -- at age level of course! no newspapers!! -- ever since.

However, the actual process J went through to learn how to read was mostly a mystery to us -- the way his brain connected certain pieces didn't always make sense to us, and he just suddenly seemed to make huge leaps overnight for no apparent reason. We didn't do a thing to help him learn to read (in fact, we were pursposely NOT doing anything to lend to it at that time, realizing by then that it was the obsessive nature of Autism that was driving this desire to read), yet it happened anyway.

So with Zoo Boy (who is not affected by Autism) I've been enjoying the ride. Yet still at an earlier age than many kids take an interest in reading, probably spurred along in part by the fact his brother reads, and in part because the boy just ADORES books.

About a year ago, Zoo Boy started to figure out that it was the words on the pages of the books that told the story. He started pointed to signs and words in books and asking what they said. He learned the alphabet around that time, as well as how to recognize numbers 1 - 9, and has in the last six months or so learned to count to 100. (I want to stress that neither The Map Man nor I have done anything to encourage any of this -- we are not pushing for early readers/math wizzes -- in fact, the irony in all this is that I'm the sort of person that would have been perfectly unphased if our kids hadn't shown any interest in reading until they were well past the age most kids start to read.) The past couple of weeks, Zoo Boy's interest in having short words spelled for him, seemingly out of the blue, began and has increased in frequency over time. "Mommy, how do you spell car?"

But today he took a major leap in the reading-readiness department. As J and I were finishing up our lunches, Zoo Boy left the table and started playing around with an alphabet zoo puzzle he has (pictured above) -- each animal interconnects with the other, and has the first letter of it's name on it, with one animal per alphabet letter. He turned to me and said "How do you spell Mommy?" I told him and he made a frustrated face and complained "I can't do that, I've only got one "M". He brightened up a moment later and said "I know, I'll spell my name!" and asked how to do that. I told him, and he pulled out an animal for each letter and lined them up, turning to me proudly to show me. I just nodded my head at him, and he asked me how to spell a couple other short words. As he pondered the third one he made, he tested me. "How about ratatouille?" (Guess what we went to the movies to see yesterday!) I said "I think that word is too long and has too many of the same letters in it. He pouted over that for a minute, and then I swear I saw the lightbulb go on over his head.

He trotted down the hall and returned with a picture af various bugs, labeled with their names. Then he said "I can spell fly" and set forth picking out the animal letters he needed while refering to the picture. He triumphantly moved aside to show me "fly" spelled with a flamingo, a leopard, and a yak. I smiled at him and he went back to work, spelling all the other bugs on the chart as well. (He's working on "dragonfly" in the above photo.)

He's certainly well on his way to figuring this all out. Glad I didn't spend any money on expensive reading curriculums....