"I Want You To Teach Me How To Read"

This is the statement Sweet Baby threw at me earlier this week. Sweet Baby will be 5 at the end of May and thus should start Kindergarten in the fall. My original thought was that I would send her to 1/2 day kindergaten, just like Peanut did last year. She really loved it and because it was just 1/2 a day it wasn't to difficult on her. Besides, I can't teach someone to read - or can I? I know that some of my homeschooling friends think I'm crazy to assume that I can't do it or that it will take to much time. Part of my other reason for thinking she should attend Kindergarten is because Sweet Baby doesn't like to sit still for me, I had this grandiose idea that this year we would work on a letters notebook. I printed all these letter worksheets so we could do one letter a week and she could LEARN the capital letters and lowercase letters. Maybe we could move on to the sounds they make right? NOPE...she never did beyond letter "b". Every time I suggested she sit with me she had other stuff to do. So, I assume that she needs to go to Kindergarten to have a teacher show her how we sit and follow directions.

The other day though there was a lot of talk between her sisters about how well Peanut reads. Sissy was fretting over the fact that Peanut reads better than her and that is when Sweet Baby asked me to teach her how to read. (Kinda like potty training huh?) So I pulled out our Hooked on Phonics CD and put it in the computer (someone lovingly gifted me the first 5 levels last year, thinking that Peanut could benefit from them, but by the time we got them she was WELL above that reading level).

Well, near as I knew Sweet Baby didn't even know 1/2 of the uppercase letters. Boy did she surprise me! She breezed through the level that required them to identify the uppercase. Only had a bit of trouble with a few lower case and then went on to identify many of the SOUNDS THE LETTERS MAKE?!?! I was shocked. Could it be that she has actually been listening to the other girls practice the sounds of the phonograms when we do our spelling lessons?