Reading

I don't have a picture of Ariana reading, but I found this one that David took like a month ago.  I thought it captured her cute studious face.  He took this picture the day he was fixing our car, and so I decided to blog a bit while Viggo napped, and David worked.  Ariana quickly got her little learning computer and plopped right down next to me.   David put an apple sticker on Nana's computer so that her's would look like ours.  She loves that about her computer.

I feel like I am so behind on recording all the things my kids have been doing lately. I didn't want to forget and record that at four years old Ariana is beginning to read.  She is doing so well.  She is only reading sight words right now.  But I am so impressed at how well she sounds out her little words.  We started working on them back in March.  She found it a little frustrating at first.  At first she would say the letter instead of its sound.  But, now she is on a roll.  I bought her some more complicated sight words the other day, and she is beginning to realize that some letters have more than one sound.  I think its amazing how kids at such a young age can process all of this.  I am so proud of her!  I don't know if its out of the ordinary to be doing it at four, but either way I am just glad that she loves reading.

If you know my Nana she is not short on confidence.  She will go up and talk to anyone.  She loves making new friends.  But something different happened to her when she saw that she could read.  It was like a quite confidence.  It is so true what they say about reading.  It really helps kids feel good about themselves.  I am so glad we have read to her since she was a newborn.  Viggo and Nana adore books.  Another thing I think that has helped a lot is that every night we read scriptures together.  David always reads a verse with each of the kids.  Since Nana's is older David picks a word out from the verse that shows up various times, and makes Ariana read it every time it appears.  Viggo obviously can't do this.  But he repeats the verse after David, while sitting on his lap.    He is really cute when he does it, because if he thinks a words sounds funny he will giggle and repeat it several times, before he is able to move on to the next.  I should record it one of these evenings.  I love that they do not get overwhelmed by seeing a book with all words and no pictures.  Ariana has really come to love the stories found in the scriptures.  Its been pretty fun seeing her become such a big girl.