Caleb is Reading!

This post is way overdue, but I feel like we have been in a whirlwind since school started five weeks ago.  Since I last posted, we spent several days in the dark, thanks to the tropical storm that blew through here earlier this month.  We went from Monday evening (Labor Day) to Thursday around noon without power.  A friend helped us put a positive spin on it by labeling our adventure as "camping in our house."  The kids bought that for the first day, but after that, they were pretty tired of being in a house with no lights, no refrigerator, no microwave and no AC.  When the power came back on, Caleb was so excited, he ran up the stairs calling, "Now I can go to the bathroom with the light on!!!"

Anyway, on to the purpose of this post: Caleb is reading!  He learned how to sound out words that follow the basic phonetic rules more than a year ago, but he has just recently taken that leap from sounding out each word to seeing the group of letters as a word and recognizing "sight words."  With about 25 sight words in his reportoire, he is now able to read many of the early reader books that Mimi left us on her last trip.  And boy is he excited!  He even picks up chapter books and eagerly chooses words that he recognizes.  He's been reading for a couple of weeks now, and he is enjoying it so much that our roles have switched from me asking him to practice reading to him asking me to read with him.

I know this is opening up a whole new world for him, and I'm so happy to be enjoying it with him!