I didn’t quite think through some of the ramifications of teaching Woo to read when we started out. Actually we didn’t exactly teach him, we supported as he pretty much taught himself how to read. We did help him, as did N at day care, but he lead the process and progressed at a much faster rate than we anticipated. He amazed us by reading his first words by his third birthday, and chapter books by his fifth. He is rather advanced in his reading as a result, and we try to keep up with him.
He doesn’t just read books, he devours them. There aren’t really libraries like we have at home, so we have developed a pattern of visiting the closest bookstore about once a week. He sits and methodically goes through the books, selecting all that strike his fancy, and letting us filter down until there is a pile of three to five new books. Thankfully books here are reasonable, or we would be broke!
We had a dry spell recently, when we didn’t get to the bookstore for a few weeks. During this time he read and re-read many of his books, but also turned to the kitchen, and started to read my cookbooks. They now sport many a bookmark on recipes that he would like for us to make together, which actually helps with meal planning. A couple are still missing, but I am sure they are tucked away in his room. This also led to some fun experimenting in the kitchen, with only one real failure, the apple milkshake, and one jar of oddly matched spices that he mixed up for me to use in recipes that call for curry powder*.
My sister and brother-in-law gifted him with the entire Roald Dahl collection for Christmas this year, a completely awesome gift. He was intimidated at first, and decided that he didn’t want them. We quickly realized that he was a little lot overwhelmed by the size of the collection and the sheer number of words, so we tucked them away in our room. He still knew where they were, and would come to flip through them most mornings, so I offered to read one to him in early January. I chose The Giraffe and the Pelly and me because it was the thinnest, and looked silly enough. He was hooked right away, and read ahead in the book after I left him, then finished it on his own a day or so later. He now comes to our room every week or so to select a new Dahl treasure to read. He asks us to read parts of them, some of the time, but he tends to burn through them quickly on his own.
The book that he chose most recently was George’s Marvellous Medicine. He read it with much glee, and then asked that I read several chapters with him one night at bed time. We started with George’s creation of this magical medicine, the chapter where he basically throw everything, the good, the bad, and the poisonous, into a pot to serve as medicine for his evil grandma. He is enjoying this a little too much, and warning bells go off in my head. We spend a long time discussing why that would be a dangerous thing to do, and how Woo should never consider touching half of that stuff, let alone feeding it to anyone, before moving on to the moment when Grandma gets the meds. He seems to understand that the book is silly fun, and should not translate to real life.
This morning I woke to an eerie silence in the house. I knew that the lils were up, as I had already been shown the marker manicures that they gave each other. When my queries as to what they were doing were met with silence, I headed down stairs to the kitchen. There were spices everywhere, a pile of wet tea towels, a bottle filled with murky liquid, and two lils, looking both guilty and pleased with themselves. I looked at the bottle closely, and it appeared to be mostly water and chillies, with dashes of oregano, nutmeg, and rosemary for good measure. As we cleaned and talked this through, Woo repeatedly assured me that this was not a medicine like George had made, it was merely a potion. I shudder to think how close Goose was to getting a dose of that spicy potion!
He has now moved on to The Twits, where Mr. and Mrs. Twit play horrible practical jokes on each other. Tonight Willy discovered that in chapter four, she serves him worm spaghetti for dinner. I can see where this is going… Maybe there is something to be said about selecting age appropriate reading for your lils. It’s not about the difficulty of the words or that the content is too mature for them, it’s so that parents can be prepared for all the naughty things that they learn!
*Curry powder seems to be a pretty North American thing, so I have a mixture of spices that includes coriander, cumin, turmeric, chillies, cinnamon, sugar, ground ginger…. That I use in some recipes. Guess he thought my mixture was lacking!
