I guess I find it so amazing because I didn’t learn to read till I was in 1st grade. (~7 years old) What’s even crazier is that my daughter is learning to read before she learns all her letters. Basically she learns to recognize the word, the letters it turns out aren’t all that important. I didn’t actually learn that skill till 5th grade., and I only learned it then because I didn’t know how to use the scroll buffer in the Qmodem term program and I had to teach my self to quickly read the words that streamed in from the 2400bps modem I was using to surf BBS’s. (pre-commonly available internet) As you might imagine once I learned to read words without seeing the letters my reading speed increased dramatically. I can typically put down a couple of meaty books on a flight from NYC to LA. I can only imagine what Jordan’s reading speed will be.
Anyway, I’m just fascinated by my daughter. You should have seen the look on my face when I saw her read the first word a few weeks ago. Of course my wife and I were sure it was a lucky guess the first time we saw it happen, so we show her another word and she nails that one too. It starting to come faster now, more words, more letters, and she is even beginning to count. All things I have to say I simply didn’t do till the K-1 timeframe.
It’s also cool to see how her mind works. We used to laugh when she was learning to talk because I would ask her to say “Daddy” and she would immediately reply “Papa”, and vice versa. It’s like I would say a word and she would say the first thing that popped to mind. Well the funny thing is this happens in reading to. We wrote “DOG” on the board and she immediately replied “Puppies!” Hmm...