The Reading Machine

Elijah has been reading on his own for the past several months. This boy loves reading. This is a total shock to me, because I had to practically force Samuel to sit down and read every day, and even then, I don't think it all truly "clicked" until he was 6 or even 7 years old. I tried not to let that get to me, but you know how it is with the firstborn....everything must be on schedule!

For Elijah, it has been so natural. It all just fell right into place in his brain. He has loved learning the phonograms in the Spell to Write and Read curriculum. Even Isaac is picking up phonics combinations he recognizes in print, like "ie" or "ea" with an excited, "Hey! That's a phonogram!" Thank you, Wanda Sanseri!

He devours books. Last week he sat with one of our children's bibles for an hour and read the whole thing, cover to cover. And thanks to sitting in on Samuel's homeschool work for the past year, he reads words like "frustrated" and "promised land" with ease.

He also loves writing, and making up chore lists for himself everyday. Below is one such list that he came up with last week. It's all his spelling. The last one is a "Tessellation Project," which is something Samuel had to do earlier this year. It involved rotating shapes on a grid so that they formed a repeating pattern. Since that project, anything that involves coloring and cutting and gluing and shapes has become a "tessellation project."

Kids brains are so amazing to me. We think that we are teaching them, but yet they are so wired to learn. It makes me all the more motivated to be a quiet instrument of God in this process. He created them. He knows them. He will raise men out of these boys.