Nathan has been able to recognize all the letters of the alphabet for a long time now. The last couple of months we have been teaching him the sounds that each letter makes, and some simple letter combinations as well, like ‘sh’, ‘ar’ and ‘oy’. We spell our simple words and then sound them out, and I think he is slowly getting the hang of sounding out the words. Some words he knows how to spell just from the repetition of spelling them regularly. He can spell ‘Nathan’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Toby’ and ‘stop’. Stop is mostly because of the book ‘Hop on Pop’ where it goes ‘STOP, you must not hop on pop’.
Tonight we went to a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner. On the way I asked Nathan if he wanted to have Vietnamese soup for dinner, which he was quite excited about. We chose a restaurant, sat down at a table and looked at our menus. Nathan pointed to one of the soups and told us he wanted that one. I asked him what it was and he told me it was soup. I asked him how he knew it was soup….he pointed to the last word of the menu item (the menu item was something like beef and noodle soup) and slowly spelled out the word ‘soup’.
Tonight, just before he went to sleep, I asked Nathan if he could spell ‘soup’, and he did. So I’m pretty sure that he really can read the word. It has blown me away, as I don’t think that soup is a word that we have spelled out much, if at all. What else can the boy read that I am unaware of?
