Becoming a Reader - Sight Words

I haven't spent a whole lot of time on learning activities lately, but the wonderful thing about children is that they is that they don't need fancy planned out lessons to learn. They are so eager! There is virtually no stopping them. Tonight before dinner, E found a little notepad and was pretending to write little notes to everyone in the family. She wanted to sign her name so I helped her write out Emily on a piece of paper. Just for fun I wrote out Mommy on a piece of paper and asked her who's name it was. "Mommy" she spouted out with no hesitation. Then I wrote Daddy on a piece of paper and asked who's name that was. "Daddy" she said. I couldn't believe it! I proceeded to write down the names of other family members and stuck the pieces of paper on her chalk board and quizzed her to see if she was actually "reading" them or just happened to get lucky. Sure enough, she got them all right. I mixed them up and quizzed her again. Again she got them all right! The most impressive thing to me is that a couple of times she almost mixed up Daddy with Papa and Mommy with Nana, but then self corrected herself.

Now, I think she is mostly identifying each name by the letter that it starts with rather than actually reading letter for letter, but I did add the word Pizza to the board ( I told her what it said as I added it ) and she correctly and consistently identified it without confusing it with Papa, so who knows... Either way, learning sight words is such an exciting milestone that we are sure to have fun with in the near future! I am just so proud of my little girl!!!