What Happens When Your Six Year Old Becomes a Better Reader Than You?

Warning!

Extremely proud mother bragging about her amazing child!

Kaelyn has always been a good reader. At church, her teachers will stop me and tell me how great of a reader she is (some of them are actual school teachers). Fairly recently she has finally started to love reading. She'll just pick up a book on her own and start reading it. She has been reading The Book of Mormon every day since the first of the year and will finish it on the last day of the year. And she has also decided that she would try and do the 100 day program after she finishes so she can read The Book of Mormon twice before she turns eight.

Lately, she's been reading a lot. If chapter books were food, she'd be inhaling them! So she picked up Chronicles of Narnia a few days ago. I would have liked her to wait on them, but she's reading and I'm not about to discourage her. I used to think that she had a comprehension problem. During school, we'll read and then I'll ask her questions. Sometimes she can answer them and sometimes she can't. I wasn't sure if she just wasn't comprehending what she was reading or what was being read to her, if she's just being lazy, or just not interested in being forced to read. So thinking she might have a problem with comprehension, ideally I would have liked her to wait on reading them when it improved. Which is also why I've put off letting her read Harry Potter (which she wants to read really bad). I have no doubt that she can read them, I'm just not sure if she would get anything out of them. So her book was in the van yesterday and Ryan picked it up. He was amazed on how far she was, so we started asking questions about it. I've never read them, but over the summer Ryan had read them. She was able to have a conversation about it with him and remembered certain details. I was shocked! I'm so proud of her.

Not only is she getting better at understanding what she's reading, she is also becoming a speed reader. I was thinking about possibly getting a speed reading program for her when she's old enough, but I don't think I need to. She's actually faster than me (which isn't saying much. I'm pretty slow reader when I'm reading silently). She read "Freckle Juice" in 30 minutes. It's not a horribly long book, but I didn't think she could finish it in 30 minutes. I asked her to tell me what it was about (I didn't believe she read it). And from what I remembered when I read it as a kid, she not only read it, she remembered it (and some names too). And the other day I asked her to finish a Magic Tree House book for school and she said she already finished it. She didn't have that book for more than and hour, probably less.

I'm so proud of her. The reason why I wanted to teach her to read early was to try to create a love of reading. I was never a reader. I'm starting to become one though. So I wanted my children to love to read. Which is always why I'm a sucker for books for my kids. Throw a school book club order form in my face and I'll probably order. Or if I don't have the money I look through it for days picking out books for them I'd order if I had the money. I used to spend a ton of money at Barnes & Noble for the kids. I want to have tons of books around for my kids, so they have plenty of options. It is getting harder though. Especially since Kaelyn is getting to that age where reading the same books over and over isn't doing it for her anymore.