It's not just learning to read

I may have mentioned this before, but learning to someone read who is just learning is painful. I mean, Painful with a capital P. Right now it's Nolan, but it was Abby two years ago. When I listen to Abby read now, I'm really quite amazed at how quickly she learned. She reads words that she has no idea what they mean, and can sound out names and other difficult pronounciations.

Nolan has come so far, considering he couldn't read at all when he started kindergarten. And he's progressed by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, and I'm so very proud of him. Really! But it's still painful, especially when he isn't in the mood. But what's really interesting is realizing that he's not just reading, he's actually learning words. Abby, for whatever reason, spoke clearer when she was five and six years old, but Nolan has a little bit of, something. It's not really a lisp, but just some speech thing that I'm sure will go away as he gets older. So because of that, the sounds of words don't necessarily match the letters of the words. For example, he read the word "grabbed" but was confused because he thought it should be "gravved" with a v. And he was really confused with "tadpole" because he calls them "tadapolt".

Between that, and just general English language (try learning know, show, brow, cow, mow, tow, toe, go), I'm glad I don't have to re-learn how to read!