16-Jul-08 - Reading Lesson 97

When Liam was just about Parker's age, he still wasn't talking all that much. He could make his point clear, but he was nowhere near as efficiently articulate as Park is. At the time, we had windows right next to our dining table, and outside of one of those windows sat a lovely planter of flowers, courtesy of Babcia, on a stand where we could see them. We removed that window screen so that we could open the window and Liam could help me water the flowers without having to walk the long way around the apartment building to the back.

One day as we were sitting there eating, Liam was staring at the bouquet outside. He suddenly gulped down the remains of the food he was chewing, opened his eyes wide like saucers -- for just a second Damian and I both felt like we were watching a cartoon, where the character's overlarge, star-specked, eyelash-batting eyes imply the epitome of eager, innocent cuteness -- and suggested, "Water flowers??" Only, in his two-year-old speech it came out, "Vah fows??" We cried laughing.

This evening, we were working on reading lesson 97 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. As usual, there was a short list of words for him to read before he got to the actual story. He frequently fits the word into a sentence so he can show me that he understands what word we're talking about, but we did not do that for the first several words - until he read "shine." Then he turned to me and, in an older, milder version of the cartoon moment described above, he said, "Shine upon you." For a second I just stared at him, thinking, "Why does he know that phrase?" Then I burst out laughing. Of course, since he was tiny, he has been listening to Michael Card's lullaby album Sleep Sound in Jesus. The final song is from Num. 6.25: "...the Lord make His face shine upon you."

The story starts, "A mouse had a house that shined." By the time he read that far, he had forgotten all about our previous joke, so he went into gales of giggles when I turned to him and added, "...upon you!"

He read the word "very" as if it were "ferry." I asked him if he was sure that was a "fff" sound, and he corrected, "Vewy... but we say thewy." "No," I replied, "that's what you say!" He has always said his r's like w and his v's like th - but only in some words. "Very" gets turned into "thewy," but "hard" and "vacuum" stay regular. Now he is old enough to produce the correct sounds, at least when he sounds words out. A phonics-type aural approach built into the reading lessons has definitely made him more aware of the sounds he hears around him. But he goes back to old habits in his normal speech.

The last word in his list was "dust." He frequently mixes up d and b, so he confidently read the word as "bust." We corrected that, and when he encountered it in the story he read it correctly. But when I asked him, "What was the mouse doing with that rag?" he repeated, "Picking up every bit of bust." It was not a joke; his mind had just played a trick on him and inverted the letter in his memory.

If the amount of laughter going on in our lesson was a good indication, then we were getting merrier and merrier.

*****

Actually, "r" is frequently pronounced as y, as in "fahy" for "far" and "Pahykew" for Parker.