Amazing Reading

Rhiannon loves reading. It is quite possibly her favorite thing to do. She can be found with her nose in a book several times a day often at length. At first when she finished a book I did not believe that she really had. I feel terrible saying it but it is true. I mean she is 6 years old and she can read a Little House on the Prairie book or its equivalent over the course of a few days! I quizzed her about each chapter even down to little details that I thought she might have been breezing over and she always answered me right. I finally just believed her until today again.

We are going to see a theater production of Pippi Longstocking and I wanted her to know the story first. I was going to do it as a read aloud with her but added it to her weekly reading chart instead. She needs to read 30 minutes a day though she often reads much more. She sat down with the book and read the entire thing in one sitting. It is about a 140 page book. It includes some pictures and is a smaller sized book but still. I honestly did not believe her and quizzed her down to some very specific details and had her narrate parts of it. She knew all the details! Guess I need to stop second guessing her but it was hard to believe.

The funny thing was she really did not want to read this book. She has been resisting me for a week because she has been in the middle of the Mary Poppins series and wants to read nothing else until she is done. Normally I would just go with that but since we have the play coming up I insisted she read the book. She grudingly did and I knew she would love it. She laughed out loud and you could see she was really enjoying it. She asked me if there were other books written about Pippi and could I get them for her. Tonight she picked up her Mary Poppins series again (she is on the fourth book in the series) which she is also really enjoying.

As a family we currently have three read alouds going. The kids like having one special one that just dad reads (Serona actually does the voices) so his current book is Redwall. Then Ciaran and Sirah really fought about who gets to pick the next one so I agreed to work through two at the same time. So we are reading "The World of Pooh" by AA Milne (I just adore the artwork and the language and story yet again) and "Rogue Planet" - a star wars novel (which I do edit some as I read). We just finished off "A Horse and His Boy" and "Charlie and the Glass Elevator" for audio car books.

If you have a young daughter Rhiannon really recommends Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking, either to read herself or as a read aloud.

Peace,
Tenniel