My little reader

Abigail and I have resumed her reading lessons. It started a few weeks ago when she expressed renewed interest in trying it out and we've progressed to making it a mostly regular thing again. I've found her enthusiasm pretty consistent, though when her eagerness wanes I can easily revive it when I tell her that when she can read I'll be able to write her special notes, just for her. That, and shortening the lessons when they are hard, has been a winning combo to get my spunky little learner excited about reading, and today was so exciting! I think she turned a corner. We've been working on reading words "the fast way," i.e. looking at a word and saying the word without sounding it out letter by letter first. Today was the first day Abigail was supposed to read a story the fast way the first time, and this is what my scholar read:

a fish in the rain

a girl met a man in the rain. that man got wet. that girl got wet.

the man said, "this is not fun."

the girl said, "this is fun."

the man said, "I have wet feet. so I will go home. I hate rain."

the girl said, "we can get fish." so she got a fish and gave it to the man.

Does anyone else out there think that this is just awesome?! My little girl is reading! (Everything is in lowercase--except for the article "I"--because we haven't gotten to talking about capitals versus lowercase yet.) These are some hard words, too. Try sounding out the word "girl" or "to" or "the" phonetically and you'll see just how tricky some words can be, even though seasoned readers don't think twice about them. I was a little nervous when I saw that today was reading the fast way from the get-go. Usually we read through the story one time by sounding out each word before we get to the fast stuff, but Abigail tackled it with such vigor I was just in awe of my little brainiac. What fun!