program participation (or Kiddo reads)

The other morning, the girls were in Babs' room. I walked in to find Kiddo reading this book to Babs. It was wonderful. Babs now frequently asks Kiddo to read to her.

I believe in letting kids who are not yet in school drive their own education. I will teach them things, but only when they show desire. Yet I pushed her into this. But only a little bit.

Kiddo came home at the end of preschool last year with a student evaluation. Among many things, it said that she could recognize her name, and those of many of her classmates. I put this with some other things I'd noticed, and decided to try to teach her how to read over the summer.

Her participation in my goal for her changed from day to day, meaning she's like all of us. Some days we would do the minimum daily work, other days she would read, and read, and read.

Since (pre)school started, I've let her do things at her own pace, although I still practice with her some days. She is becoming an independent reader, even if she doesn't recognize it.

Two Sundays before the primary program, she got assigned her part. In the initial practice, as each child's name was called, he or she came to the podium, repeated the sentence told to him or her by the leaders, then sat down. Unless the assignment was a talk, those children just came up, got the assignment paper, then sat back down. Kiddo was assigned a talk, but didn't understand that she was just supposed to come back down without saying anything. So she stood there, expectently, waiting for someone to tell her what to say. When no help came, she looked at her paper, and clearly read "I am blessed when I choose the right." By that point I got her attention, and had her sit down.

That week, I wrote her a five paragraph talk, which she read for the program. It may not have been written by herself, (I already had her write her own talk, she's not ready for that yet) but it was delivered as well as any of the older kids did, and better than many of them.

Disturbingly, I made her read it about four times to practice. But she recited it almost entirely from memory when the actual program came around.This recitation caused me no small amount of angst, because she had been cracking a joke about her talk for the last few days, and I was very worried it would make it into the talk. She kept to the script though.

As well as her own independent reading, she reads her verse in the scriptures with us each night.

She notices things written all the time. I am becoming aware that if I don't want her to read it, I need to write in cursive.

I am so proud of her.