Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that Emma’s nightly routine is changing a little. Now she reads us a story or 2 before we read to her. She likes to read books that don’t have a lot of text in them and saves the longer stories for us to read to her. On Friday night, I was reading her a story with a cat called Nebut (I pronouce it nay-boo). About the third time I encounter the name in the story, Emma interrupts me to say, “You’re not saying it right Daddy. It’s nay-but.” Of course, I apologise and adjust the remainder of the story accordingly.

So much for the study that says that kids don’t follow along with the words with you. If it’s a picture book, I don’t doubt that they may focus on the pictures the first few times through. Now the thing is that I don’t recall Nebut in any other story of hers. And this story has several lines of text per page. Obviously, they eventually follow along with the words and are able to pick them out of several lines of text. And that’s not just words that they encounter all the time but ones that they don’t encounter in other books.

Even though we talk about unschooling regularing in this blog, it is worth noting that she’s had no formal instruction on either phonics or whole language structures. And not only has she developed recognition of words but a concrete sense of how they ought to sound to the extent that she’s confident enough to correct an adult. What she knows, she has learned from us reading to her, looking at books herself and from questions she has asked us