She can READ!!!

As Pop Pop would say, "Holy Smoke an Tabacca!"   I've been watching closely and listening to Chelsee as she masters every single sound our crazy alphabet makes!  Even the 2 letter chunks!  Ever since she came home a year and a half ago, she has amazed us with her command of the English language.  To be honest, most children adopted internationally need speech help in some form or another....especially children that were *older* like Chelsee was at adoption time.  But as she memorized the ABCDs (as she calls them), I could tell it was coming easily to her.  Even the "X" sound only took about 3 days to perfect!

So as I continued to read to her and she continued to tell me how the letters sounded to her, I thought that it might be possible for her to actually learn to read in Kindergarten!   Well, as of yesterday, she can!  Already!  Proud mom here!  I LOVE this stepping stone for kids, it is just huge!

Chelsee's homework includes a book a day for them to read, either by themselves, or with the help of an adult or with an adult reading it entirely to them.  Her reading log started on Sep 21, not even 2 weeks ago.  The books that were sent home were one letter books...meaning each page had one word on it beginning with the same letter.  The picture on the other side of the page showed what the word was.   By the second book, she was figuring out how to determine the word by looking at the picture (to be sure, she has been using this method for quite a long time now).   So after mastering the I, X, T, C and a few other books, I marked down in her log that she was "reading" them on her own!   Well yesterday, a true reading book level 2 came home.  "The toy box" is a cute little book that shows a little boy cleaning up his toys by putting them back in the toy box.  Right away, Chelsee noticed a couple of "sight" words.  Those are words she can recognize by sight like is, the, in, I, dog, see, etc.  So she just basically took over and starting reading "The toy box.", "The cars are in the box.", "The rabbits are in the box.", "The teddy bears are in the box.", "My toys are in the box."

Oh I got chills!  She screamed, "I can READ!"  We hugged, I cried!   That child!!!!