Phonics

Milestone XXXII

Here's a clip of Justin reading. The toughest part of the video was finding an age-appropriate book that he hadn't already memorized. How a child can memorize 64 pages of a book (The Cat in The Hat) is still amazing to me... We're the ones who read the book 100 times to him, and I can't tell you the first 3 lines of the second page without looking, let alone the entirety of (say) page 42... verbatim! Anyway, back to my point... I tried to find a book that we hadn't read to him yet, and that he therefore hadn't memorized yet. He's got a series of leapfrog books that have a lot of common words in 'em that he's become familiar with, and so I thought this would be a good one. We've also used a lot of the words in this book for his penmanship drills, so that helps too (you'll hear him say, "that's my sentence!"). He has already read it independently 2 or 3 times over the past couple of weeks... but I think it was still fresh enough to get the gist of where he is with reading. When I find time, I'll try to tape him with a spanking brand new sight unseen book to see how he does with that.

Side note... do people still say "tape" when they talk about video... or is that me sounding old again?

Anyhow... the video is grandparent length (i.e., too long for anyone but a grandparent to watch in it's entirety)... and includes a brief intermission as I become suddenly hysterical when Justin spots a wasp in the classroom. But here it is, nonetheless. For the record, as they say.