October 26, 2005 - Wednesday
Harry amazed me tonight at bedtime by pulling out one of several books on dinosaurs that he'd recently borrowed from the library and flawlessly reading and pronouncing the the title, "Archaeopteryx and Other Flying Dinosaurs." It actually wasn't the reading that was the surprise. He's had this series of books for several days now and had one from the series even before that. We'd been practicing sounding out and reading the words, including the titles to all of them listed on the back of that first volume.

The surprise was actually pronouncing "Archaeopteryx" and pronouncing it flawlessly and without hesitation. This Archaeopteryx book is a new volume in the series that was not listed on that first book we had and it's one about flying dinosaurs that I hadn't read to him yet. He said grandpa read it to him [on Saturday night when we were out at a concert], so it's not like he'd sounded it out himself or had never really heard the word. But, it's a long word and a hard word and, frankly, it's a word that I still can't pronounce without thinking about and working through fairly deliberately. I'll admit I'm certainly not the best at fast reading or elocution, but I am almost 43-years-old and Harry is not yet 6 and what struck me this evening is that he is more proficient at pronouncing these words and securing them to memory than I am. And, frankly, it's happened many times with these books. I'll go through and slowly read the phonetic spellings of the dinosaur names I've never heard and he'll just repeat them and rattle them off without a struggle. And he'll know them the next night before I can make it through the phonetics. Part of that is a youthful brain. Part of it is Harry's own ability with sounds and words.


Comments, Opinions?