Reading

Riley has gotten really into reading these last few months. She’s always loved being read to, but now she wants to do the reading. At first she just memorized her books and recited them, but recently she’s started making up her own stories with bits and pieces of all her books. When she reads she often turns the book around so her animals or we can see the pictures (the way I’m sure the daycare teachers do when reading to the group). it’s pretty cute.

This is an oldish video from when we went to San Francisco in February.

We’ve been trying to go the library every couple weeks to get new books for her. It’s hard to come by good beginner chapter books, but Riley is remarkably not picky. Some favorite book series are frog and toad, iris and walter, little bear, henry and mudge.

Whenever I’m not on call I read to Riley before bed (or she reads to me). Recently it’s been hard to lie flat so I sit against the wall and Riley lies in front of me holding the book and using my belly as a pillow. When I’m really tired or not feeling well, she’ll specifically choose books she thinks I like (for example Snuggle Puppy, which is a book I love that we sing). Once when I was going to take a nap post-call, Riley offered to read me some books and tuck me in. She is such a sweatheart, it’s amazing.

Recently she’s been asking us to define words more often, which is actually kind of challenging. Some recent words were any (which Sage says is hard to define without using set theory), favor, possible, and literally. Often she uses full phrases she picks up from other people, but clearly doesn’t quite know the meaning of.

I heard a story on This American Life about how the most important years for learning are actually 0-3, and the shear number of words a child hears in those years is the biggest predictor of how well they’ll do in school later (tv doesn’t count). If that’s true then Riley is all set. With all the grown ups she hangs out with she’s heard plenty of words, and her vocabulary is pretty broad.