Reading

Magda has really taken to reading and it's amazing to watch her evolution and progress from week to week.  She's known her letters for years and has been wanting us to "follow the words with our finger" when reading to her for a long time.  But she really only started to seriously try to read since beginning kindergarten this fall.

And then something clicked and she's started enjoying the process of making her way slowly through early-reader primers. And then it became more fluent.  A couple of weeks ago she was "bored" at Kat & Steve's Christening party and Kat's dad lend her a big-ol' Dr. Seuss book and, to her surprise, Magda made it through Green Eggs and Ham all on her own.  Now she often grabs a book and reads for pleasure.  Usually it's stuff that she's heard many times already, though she doesn't just recite from memory.  But often it's new early-reader books she gets from school or we pick up at the library.

Today, we picked up a couple of Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa books from the library.  She started reading one in the car and then walked from the car to the kitchen with her nose in the book barely paying attention to anything Jennifer was trying to ask her.  I can totally see my young self in her.

She also has started reading pretty much any environmental text that catches her eye - ads, posters, the panhandler signs at intersections, etc.  Sometimes she asks what some complex word means, but most often she just reads.  We were at Barnes & Nobles today, and while I was looking at some books and kind of ignoring her, I snapped at attention when I heard her haltingly read one of the many calendar titles on the shelf.  To my relief she didn't ask what a "Bitch" was - I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing that she didn't, but I'm going to pretend she thought it had something to do with dogs.  On the other hand, she didn't have any problems with the cursive typeface it was written in, so that's a good thing, right?