Eating breakfast & Learning to read

What do you eat for breakfast most of the time? Cereal? Breakfast is a great meal, it's interesting to me to see family preferences at breakfast. Fixitman loves sugary cereal by the mixing bowl. He'll eat an entire box in one sitting. Trainboy enjoys cereal and milk as well. Dinoguy only likes cereal as a snack, right out of the box. I stopped eating cereal a while ago. I'm lactose intolerant to some degree, so I don't use milk, and orange juice on cereal only works with some kinds. I stopped drinking soy milk because large quantities of soy are now bad for you. And I read about cereal being bad for you in Nourishing Traditions. So we started eating porridge, the longer cooked version of oatmeal. It's good. Dinoguy loves his "oatmeal" for breakfast with fresh fruit or jam mixed in it, Fixitman & I enjoy it a lot with apple butter mixed in, but Trainboy only eats it sometimes. He prefers cold cereal! Fascinating stuff to me. See my porridge post on my food blog if you want the recipe...

But I digress. The point of this post is remembering breakfast as I kid for me. We mostly had cereal, (I wasn't intolerant of milk at the time), and usually healthier varieties. But I loved to read the cereal box each morning, absorbing all the words on it. It was as important to me as reading the comics each morning.

Dinoguy is learning to read. It's a fascinating process to me, though not at all like I remember my journey. I remember deciding to learn to read and memorizing books to tell my mom I could read. She knew I was memorizing and said it didn't count, but somewhere along the way, I went from just knowing what words were on the page to being able to recognize them and read them. Reminds me of that email forward where all the words are mixed up except the first and last letters of each word, but you can still read it.

Yeah phonics help, but when you know how to read, you don't sound out words. You just know them and read them. Dinoguy recognizes and knows a lot of words, though I'm not sure even he realizes this. He's learning them from the TV, the computer games & the board games we play. From the signs he sees off the road when we are driving around. He's become aware of words and the information contained in them.

He asks me what things say on signs and repeats it to himself and then starts saying it when he sees the same sign again (or asks me again if he doesn't remember). In the car we play the "how do you spell" game. He asks me how to spell words and repeats it to himself. Sometimes they are words he already knows I think and sometimes they are new words. Trainboy likes this game too. A variation of the game is he tells me some letters and asks me what it spells.

One evening we had a disagreement about how to spell the word "dough". He asked, I spelled it, and he told me I was wrong and said it had a "w" in it, asking me to listen to the sound. I tried to explain that -ough is a special sounding part of some words, but he was firm that I was wrong. I let it go. It was a fun moment. :)

He won't perform and read on command. He's overwhelmed by unfamiliar words in books, and tells me he can't read them. As a result, I stopped asking him to read things, but allow him to do it when he wants.

He migrates towards shows about reading like Word World and Super Why?. After we've read a book a few times, he starts reading it to himself, but he's becoming much more accurate and looks at the words some, not just the pictures. At the library, he picks out the graphic novel type books, a la Captain Underpants, which we have some of thanks to gifts I gave his dad when Dinoguy was a baby.

I studied mathematical learning in college, and know all the little parts of numerical literacy he's developing. But the reading literacy is fascinating to watch him develop, since I don't have any checklists in my head and just get to enjoy watching his journey.