Ella and reading

I feel so privileged to have such a front-seat row to the phenomenon of Ella's learning to read.

She's right there, perched on the edge, right at the cusp of it being easy.

It's still an effort, for the most part, but five things are characterizing this new stage:

1) She knows a LOT more words by sight. Sometimes I can't tell if she knows them by sight or knows them from context; regardless, she's reading a lot faster.

2) She is sounding out words much more quickly, sometimes, as with easy ones, so quickly that it does not cause a pause in her reading; words like "mud."

3) She is starting naturally to read signs when we're out and about. They are visible to her as words rather than as symbols.

4) When there is something to be read, she often (though not usually) stops me when I start reading it for her, and says, "No, I want to read it!" For our now-7-year-old friend Dario last year, that was the hallmark of his reading -- once he had it even a little, he wanted to do it. Ella has always, since she was a baby, had the philosophy, "Well, if someone else can do it for me, why not? Comfort is important, after all." She had that attitude about hiking, too, but even that is starting to change.

5) Ella is becoming willing, even eager, to hear chapter books without pictures read aloud. She has explained to me in the past that she can't see the pictures in her head for chapter books; in this way, she is very different from Madison at the same age. But now that we're listening to a lot of books-on-CD in the car, she's even happier to hear books than music. She loves hearing snippets of the Harry Potter books that Madison is reading (she's in the middle of book 5), and Ella loves the Harry Potter movies. We're listening to Emlyn's Moon right now, a tale set in Wales.

At one-month-before-6 with Madison, we had made our way through my reading all 19 of the original Boxcar Children series, and Madison was very motivated to learn to read them on her own. She was very skeptical that she could do it, but right at this age, she started to try it and that was it, she was off to the races and has never "needed" us to read to her since. I think Ella will be chronologically a little behind Madison, but not too far. She likes the Boxcars, but she's in no way obsessed with them as Madison was.