Reading and Writing All Summer Long

I love the learning-to-read years. It's so much fun to watch kids find a whole new world opening up to them. This summer Peirce has made great strides in his reading skills. He now reads all the street signs, the menus, the neon signs on stores, and everything else he comes across. He also has taken to re-writing his favorite books. He wrote "The Very Hungry Scorpion", patterned after Eric Carle's similar book, is working on "Chester" (not sure how his version will vary yet....it's a work in progress), and has a number of other start and stop writing projects.

I make attempts to encourage my kids to spend time reading and writing all summer long. I seem to always start off with the idea of making a summer journal...and then that dies off quite quickly. This summer, as I started paying attention, I realized that they do plenty of reading and writing in many different ways. Jill can often be found lost in a book for hours - and I can't wait for Peirce to discover the enjoyment that can come from that as well. I've done a LOT of reading chapter books out loud. Sometimes I make him read to me....but mostly he prefers having me read to him (much less cumbersome!)

Peirce learned to google this summer....and so he spent lots of time looking up things that really matter to him: kinds of cars, kinds of trees, all the flags for every country in the world, best Webkinz animals, etc., etc., etc! The page above from his notebook is one of his lists he worked on for hours - kinds of dogs. Oh, and he also learned how to book mark cook sites he comes across. A whole new world!

I don't know how he came up with the idea....but he could often be found with the scrabble board making words from TV shows, or books, or words that just came into his head. Usually he'd leave letters out and make us guess what the words were (kind of like Wheel of Fortune, he said!) The fact that he came up with this idea himself and could often be found doing it for hours on ends gives credence to the whole unschooling idea that I'm intrigued by.

....and of course, there's rock band! He's really good at reading those lyrics. His favorite is "I think I'm Paranoid!"