“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
~ Dr. Seuss
I think that Munchkin is taking that literally. Munchkin is reading. Everything. Doesn’t matter what it is, she’s reading it. Books, magazines, newspapers, street signs, cereal boxes. Everything. And she’s doing an amazing job.
This summer we signed her up for the summer reading program at our library. For every 3 books she reads, she gets a prize. For the first three books she got a free ice cream cone from McDonalds and a pass for us all to go to Family Swim at our YMCA. Pretty nice. She finished the second set of 3 books but we haven’t made it back to the library yet.
In this group of books, she had picked out one that was for Grades 1 to 3, Arthur Tricks the Tooth Fairy. I encouraged her to pick out a few others becuase I didn’t want her to get discouraged if it was too hard for her. That’s not what I told her, but it’s what I was thinking. We left with 4 books for her and 2 for Peanut.
Peanut had fallen asleep on the ride home so while she napped, Munchkin went straight to reading. Of course, she picked the Arthur book. As she opened the book, all I could think was “there are a lot of words.”
And as she closed the book, all I could think of was “I should not underestimate what my daughter can do.”
She read the whole thing, beginning to end, and needed help with 2 words. TWO!
Yesterday she received some mail from the school. It was a nice letter from the teacher printed on cute kid-themed paper. Barely getting it out of the envelope, Munchkin grabs the letter and and starts reading.
“Dear Munckin. That’s me, Mommy!”
The letter talked about what her teacher had been doing for the summer (riding around in her wake board boat…must be nice) and what the schedule was like for the start of school. We’ll get to visit the school 3 times before she goes for the full day. It’s a nice way to ease the kindergarten kids into the routine.
Yet again, she blew me away by reading the whole letter. 8 1/2 x 11 single-spaced typed. Crazy.
I think on one of those visits with the teacher I’m going to have to give her a heads up about how quickly Munchkin’s reading skills have taken off.
Peanut is catching on to the reading bug too. Not that she’s reading yet, but she’s memorizing some of the board books that we read. It’s very cute to see Munchkin and Peanut read together. Munchkin will read and let Peanut finish the sentence. Which is exactly what we did with her when she was 2.
We have a few favorite books in our house:
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar
- Brown Bear, Brown Bear
- I know a Rhino
- 10 Apples up on Top
- Henny Penny
- many many many Sandra Boynton books (and CDs)
We have many more books and we’re always looking for more books to add to our collection. What are your favorite kid books? What are your kids’ favorites?
