reading

"Spiderman." Jove suddenly read the words on the notebook. He even read it upside down. I was surprised and asked him to identify 'spider' and he actually knew!

A week ago, he read 'city'. Then this morning, when I did some illustrator work of a lion family and type 'Roar!', he asked me what it was. "What do you think?" I asked him. He paused for a while, took a good look at the word, and answered, "Roar?"

My son is learning to read!!! Okay, this might not be a big news for most of you and I might sound a little stupid in feeling happy of his progress. I know one of his friend has learned to read at two year old and his same-age cousin has started to read months ago. But it's not the speed of his learning, but the wonderful process of his self-learning that I joyfully celebrate here. I've hardly initiate teaching how to read to him. He did not like flash card and he only played the phonic games when he felt like it (which was just once in every few months). Sometimes I did feel like a failure/lazy mom who was too lazy to enforce any learning to her kids (so and so has started to read and write and he is the same age as Jove, my mind would say). But when the learning spurt came back, I would stood there amazed at the whole process.

He learned reading by writing, mostly. He loves to draw line art, so naturally he started to write titles for his drawings, labels for certain things, write numbers on the race cars... and these few weeks, he started to write on dialogue balloons like comics! He would ask me how to write Indiana Jones, Lego, Spongebob Squarepants, Toy Story, Cars Toon, Madgascars, Buzz, Woody, and the like (you get the idea). I would spell the letters and he would write them. As time goes by, the spelling and the writing goes faster and he even can spell them out by himself. He started recognizing familiar words everywhere (games, the, play, etc) and started reading them. He gets really excited when he found out that he can really read those words... and so do I.

So I'm going to write it down here as a reminder for myself. I will keep on trusting my children's ability and eagerness to learn things. It's really a wonderful journey to watch them blooming and growing on their own. I'll be walking along as their helper, assistant, guide, companion, cheerleader, comforter, mommy, and whatever role they will need me to be.

Jove will start going to school in July. I'm still not very sure on how he (and all of us) will fit into the system. I guess I need to trust him more and know that he will do just fine. :P