A picture -- a thousand words

Audrey has a homework requirement to read 15 minutes every day.

That doesn't sound like much, does it? You'd think this would be an easy thing to squeeze in every day. But for some reason, this little task gets saved until the very LAST moment of her day since she likes to read at bedtime. I guess I do as well. I always take a book with me to bed ---- and I'm always sleeping within 10 minutes of cracking it open.

So, it makes sense that this 15-minute read often becomes pure torture in the absolute LAST moments of her waking hours.

Two nights ago, she chose a picture book to read. A picture book. Full of pictures.

However, each section of the book she picked has an introductory page that describes the pictures that follow. I made a deal with her that if she read those introductory pages, she could use this book for her reading time.

What happened next blew me away.

Not only did she tackle those paragraphs, she did them nearly perfectly. Words like magnification, cross-section, composition, figures, collection came spilling out of her mouth. She was able to sound them out beautifully. I was quite impressed. Her favorite new word was vivid since it sounds like Vivian. She laughed and pointed at Vivian, who was sitting on Audrey's bed putting her baby doll to sleep.

Audrey has no idea how great her skill is. She's always telling me how well the other kids in her class read. "Logan reads chapter books" is the kind of thing I hear . . . as if there's no way Audrey would be able to do that.

And then yesterday when I picked Audrey up from school, the first thing out of her mouth was, "Mom, I started AR today."

"Uhh . . . what's AR?"

"Accelerated Reading program."

ah HA!