Oliver can READ!

Claire has been painstakingly taking Oliver through the Reading Eggs programme on the computer, which are web-based lessons that are designed and aimed at nippers that want to read.

He started a little while back and has been doing absolutely brilliantly at it, learning about each letter in turn and, through repetition, playing games to make the lesson stick.

A game might introduce a letter, such a ‘B’, pronounced ‘buh’ in the phonetic-world, and then might have to burst the balloons that have the letter ‘b’ on it. Then, it progresses onto pictures of objects that start with the same sound, like ‘ball’, ‘balloon’ and so on, and then later, to later join them up so that there’s a ball and the better ‘b’ on it, to tie them both together.

The lessons are really fantastic, and we’re both absolutely amazed as to how well he’s done, earning lots of certificates from the lessons at set stages, so he’s got small challenges to work to, and a physical printed reward for doing so. Besides, he thinks he’s playing games and we know that he’s learning probably THE best thing in the world – if he struggles to read, then he’s going to carry that baggage around with him forever, so we’re investing in his future-self.

Claire’s also bought some of the books in the same range, so we’ve got some ‘grown-up’ style books for him to read to us at bed-time – he’s used to seeing Jack read his school story book to us, then as a reward for doing so, he gets either Claire or I to read to him. So, wanting to copy Jack and have what Jack’s got and be able to do what Jack does, Oli doesn’t put up a fight about doing so, as this is what he knows to be ‘normal’, which is great.

Oli and I have been working through the same Thomas the Tank Engine books that Jack and I went through a few years ago, and we’re almost done already. To begin with, he didn’t want to listen to the 5-10 minute stories, but now, it’s just part of going to bed. In fact, when we’re back late from anywhere, when it’s already late enough, trying to get him to go to bed without a story is a nightmare!! It’s quicker to read the book and get him off to sleep in a relatively happy mood, as opposed to spending the next half hour arguing with him and putting him back to bed endlessly. Again, as I said in an earlier post some time ago, it’s simply picking the battles.

Whilst he’s reading, there’s still plenty of words that he doesn’t yet know, but he’s getting to grips with a load already – to the point whereby he doesn’t need to sound-out each letter (phonetically) and try to join the sounds together, but he’s getting better at simply READING them and moving onto the next one.

I know this sounds like an obvious thing to say, as this is how children read – namely parents spending time with them, and helping them and teaching them new words, etc etc etc. But I say this simply because Oliver has only just turned four years old in the past couple of weeks. We thought Jack did well to pick up the ability to read quite early, but Oli seems to have a head start!

His pre-school teacher even took him out of his class and into another, for their teacher to asses Oli and his reading – they showed him various flashcards with single words on, no pictures, and Oli had to read the letters, form the words and pronounce them… which he did brilliantly. They were so happy, they gave him a sticker as a reward and was excited enough to tell Claire as she picked the boys up from school that day.

Good lad, Oli Riggs! My little star.

Jack’s reading

I dread to think how many books this little man has read already in his life.

He gets through his school reading books either the same night he gets it, or the following morning before school.

He will also get through at least one other book at night, that he reads to either one of us. 

We also read to him, as even though he’s not reading it, he loves the stories that we read to him. And he pays very close attention too, despite my trying to take the stories off at tangents when I think he’s not listening.

We’ve read 4 or 5 Roald Dahl books already, namely:

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• The Witches
• Georges Marvellous Medicine
• Danny, the Champion of the World
• The Magic Finger
• and probably a few more now that I think about it.

If he wakes up early in the morning, and it’s very obvious that there’s no-one downstairs, after banging around in the toilet, he’ll go back to his room and turn the light on, to sit and read one of the many millions of books that he’s lucky enough to have.

At school, he’s currently on the ‘O’ band, which means that as he works alphabetically through the bands, they get progressively harder, using bigger word or more complicated sentences. I know he’s ahead of his school friends in reading, and I think he’s doing a great job, and full credit goes to his mum, although I think technically own Amazon as a result.

First contact…

It’s bothered me for a while about how the boys are going to respond to the fact that I’ve been writing a blog, with them as the core topic.  Would they be intrigued, bothered or embarrassed about it being about them?

Well, tonight, unexpectedly, I found out, with Master Jack as the one asking questions.

He’s been reading a book about a 14 year old that has circumnavigated the globe, which was a fascinating book in itself, but there were references within the book about ‘blogging’, as he’d kept his notes and memoirs online.  Claire had to explain to Jack what a blog is, understandably, but also then mentioned that he geek-o dad had been keeping notes himself.

So tonight, instead of the now-traditional bedtimes stories as written by Charles Dickens, we picked out and read a handful of Brett Rigby Blog Posts. Hardly comparable, but made me proud/happy that someone was interested to ask about it!

We started with the very first blog post, introducing the world to my inner-brain, set the scene a little, explained a few Brett-devised things, such as his project codename, and then skipped some of the boring pre-birth stuff, as this seemed a little dreary to him. And to me, by now!

Obviously, being a boy and now fie years old at that, he bored quite quickly of the occasional blog post I picked out, as they were interesting to me, but not him.  Unless of course they happened to mention the words ‘wee’ or ‘poo’ and the like, as (being me) I obviously wrote them with some sarcastic humour… to which he loved.

We read the first post that I had written in 2014, where at this point, Oliver was well and truly in our little lives for sure, but this particular post was about Jack and how I’d forgotten how young he still was at that age, and I suppose still is, relatively-speaking. Despite it being written six months ago, though, nothing’s changed in terms of Jack’s sleeping abilities and is always awake before 6am and fighting with us as to why he’s not allowed to go downstairs by himself.

Very conveniently for Claire and I, I read the ‘Amazon-Jack’ blog post to him, as this sort of re-iterated what we’ve been trying to get across to Jack about his fantastic reading abilities, and that it comes as a result of some hard work on Claire’s part, as well as some very heavy credit-card spending, I might add!! I suppose that as he’s not know any different and is probably too young to be interested in comparisons between himself and his peers, he thinks that it’s ‘normal’, which I know it is, but he’s able to read signs on shops now, ‘help’ me navigate when driving by reading directions on roadsigns and so on.  What I am trying to say (badly) is that I feel he and his reading is a product of invested time and hard work on our part, which I know that we are both very proud of, knowing that whatever he does in life, where-ever he goes, he’s always going to read something, and that we did that for him, as opposed to ignore him and let him watch TV until 10pm. 

Anyway, I digress, he read in that blog post about how his reading bands jumped from one to the next, and again and again and it sort of looked for a moment that he might have twigged that reading is probably the best thing in the world, and the smile on his little face might have suggested that he liked it – which I know he does. 

Showing this blogging-lark to him for the first time also highlighted to Claire, Jack and I as to how much I had initially written, but had subsequently slowed right down on since then. Obviously, I have my reasons for not being able to write as much as I could have done, but it also reminded me that I do actually like doing this, and that maybe I ought to write more. Especially given that Oliver will discover this one day and will also want to know about things related to him as well as all of us, so had better get writing, thus adding to the mental weight of being a blogger!!