Rapidly reading

Kindergarten, and 'real school,' is when most kids truly start learning to read. It's a crazy process to watch, and one that's certainly uneven kid to kid. Last school year when this got started for kid #1 it was hard to see how, even with phonics, a five or six year-old can go from point a to point b. They need to learn all these different sounds and an array of rules, for example he got a cheat sheet for a whole bunch of 'secrets' that overwhelmed me. Most of the time near the end of kindergarten I was convinced he'd figured out the books he was bringing home, that had one sentence per page and a picture accompaniment, and then his memory just carried him through, i.e. he memorized them. He has a knack for that sort of thing. By all measures he was doing well but I still wasn't sure I would call what he was doing 'reading.'

The summer came and went and with the resumption of school in the fall, 1st grade now, it was like a switch had flipped. He did some reading over those months but I don't remember anything all that time intensive. We weren't forcing him, etc. I did continue reading longer, more complex books (more on that another time) almost every night, but I don't think that alone can result in what we saw. It was like, almost immediately, he could read anything and everything that we threw at him. I don't understand how this happened, but I do understand that it's pretty special and not a typical path.

Our son's school sends home a few books every week, the 'book bag,' which a group of parents volunteered to help fill, including me. These are different for every kid, in theory matching their current reading level, following a system called DRA. The resource room where these books live at school have books from levels 1-30, which according to my Googling goes just beyond a 2nd grade reading level. Our son was into the 20s pretty quickly in the fall and had reached the max of 30 well before the school year ended. They almost became something we forgot about because most of them weren't all that interesting to him. In the spring, when it was my turn, I'd fill his bags based on content more than level, with sports or historical figures (Columbus! Washington! Cleopatra!).

The reason he was less interested in the book bags books over time was not just that they were easy, it's (I have to think) that I've tried to be intentional about building out our home library and supplying him with high-quality options. I've always liked buying books and now I'm trying to stay ahead of him with, more-or-less, age-appropriate yet challenging kids ones. For Christmas I found him a cheap, used, 8 book set of Great Illustrated Classics, simplified versions of classic novels. These include The Three Musketeers, Huck Finn, Journey to the Center of the Earth and a handful more. At the time I thought I was clever and that these would keep him occupied for a while. Then he brought one on the trip to Arizona, where we were for Christmas, and basically finished it in a single day. He cruised. That's how he's been reading ever since, bringing books everywhere we go, staying up late at night, obsessing if a book catches his attention.

In short, I can hardly believe how well he's reading. He crushes many of the books I get him, I keep checking thrift stores to augment, and a number he's read multiple times. Even the more complicated books I read to the boys at night (like Narnia) he'll read ahead in, though I know he doesn't always understand all the language. Being able to read the words and understand them are different things. But he's getting there ridiculously fast, and it's been incredible to watch. I for sure think he's reading better than I did at his age. And I'm so happy that he not only already loves to read but that he's greedily devouring the classics. That's my boy.

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Books he's read on his own:

• The Boxcar Children - Warner (various)

• Magic Tree House - Osborne (various)

• The Tuttle Twins - Boyack (various)

• Fantastic Mr. Fox - Dahl

• The Wizard of Oz - Baum (Great Illustrated Classics)

• Oliver Twist - Dickens (GIC)

• The Three Musketeers - Dumas (GIC)

• Moby Dick - Melville (GIC)

• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - Pyle (GIC)

• The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Pyle (GIC)

• Heidi - Spyri (GIC)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain (GIC)

• A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Verne (GIC)

• The Swiss Family Robinson - Wyss (GIC)

• Tintin comics - Herge (various)

• Dog Man comics - Pilkey (various)

• Calvin and Hobbes comics - Watterson (various)

Books he's tried or has expressed interest in:

• Beezus and Ramona - Cleary

• Charlotte's Web - White

• Redwall - Jacques

• The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien

It'll be a while on a couple of those, but he's never lacked in ambition.