Reading

I've not been posting a lot lately, so I've skipped a number of her new language skills. A couple of months ago she started recognising uppercase letters and a few numbers. Last week she managed to read her first two words.

We were walking down the street and she kept passing and stopping at the water meters in the pavement in front of each house. On each one is written just WATER, so she'd stop and say the letters on each. Not in order. Usually something like Tee... Eee... Ay... Are... Double you.

Each time I'd say What does that spell? It spells water!

We kept this up for about 20 or so houses.

The next day L took the girl the park. A few hours after coming back she tells me, You'll never guess what the girl did today. We passed the water meters in the pavement, she stopped at one and read the letters and said water!

I explained what happened the day before and how this is one step better than that. To test, I wrote, in uppercase in my dodgy handwriting on a scrap of paper WATER and showed it to the girl. She said each letter in random order as before and said water! Partly, but not entirely scientific, but it's good enough to show that she recognises the word, not the situation.

The next day I was showing off this skill to my parents over Skype. I told them she'd read her first word and showed her the scrap of paper from the day before. She said water, then she turned over the paper and said her own name. I was a bit surprised at this. I looked down and saw that at some point L must have written the girl's name on the other side of the scrap of paper. So apparently she can read two words now.

I doubt this will scale well. At some point she needs to be able to sound out words phonetically, not by recognising the shape (I suppose if we were teaching her Kanji, it'd be a recognition and memorisation). But at least she clearly now knows that letters make words.