Parents, a princess and a pirate

"Reading is so fun!"

That's what Kylie said this evening to me. My heart soar!! Here's the story:

She has several "beginning reader" books. Books with short, commonly used words such as: the, at, we, us, I, as, can, will, and. She has never shown any interest in these books, she prefers more advanced books that I read to her.

Her school has a reading contest going to encourage kids to read and be read too. She's been coloring a cowboy hat (for the Reading Round Up program) on this paper nearly every day that we read together. Tonight she wanted to color a hat but I told her we needed to read first. I had found this beginner book when I was picking up earlier in the day and asked Kylie if she wanted to try to read this to me. It was called "Popcorn Day". She really expressed interest in reading this book to me.

So we started. Kylie worked hard at sounding out the words she didn't recognize, which were most of them. The vowels were hard for her since it would be a long or short sound and the "sh" and "th" as well as "I" were confusing for her too. She sounded out an H sound for the N's because h and n look alike. But once she would figure out a word, she remembered it. And since the book had lots of repetition, she grew more confident as she recognized the words.

I didn't want to push her so had her stop after 8 pages. But after we re-read those 8 pages, she said "Reading is so fun, let's do some more!" so we read 8 more pages. We stopped once she started getting worn out.

I gave her huge hugs as did Brett. What a special night for us, I watched her read 16 pages!! Woo-hoo for her!