Say "No" to Reading

Sydney read with me this evening. It wasn't a lot of reading on her part, but when she asks what was the first book she read, I want to be able to tell her, it was a Spot book (more specifically, Where's Spot?). She didn't read the whole thing, of course, in fact, she just read the one word, "no" over and over again. But I feel that I can call what she was doing reading because she pointed to the word when she said it and she said it the number of times it's on the page.

Here's Sydney with her book. She's very happy that she read with her mama! I read the left hand pages which said things like "Is he behind the door?"

She read the right hand pages with the flaps, which all said, "no."

But when she came to this one, which actually has the word no three times (the flap is hiding one of them), she pointed to each "no" and read the word three times.

I had a great conversation with Kara (who used to teach Kindergarten with me) about our kids and intelligence this past Saturday. The gist of the conversation was this: are our kids really super smart, or do all kids do these things and we just don't know 'cause they aren't our kids, or do we notice more because we work in early childhood education, or are we (unfairly) comparing our children with the lowest of low kindergartners (who may or may not have ever been read to and may or may not have learning disabilities, and most importantly, who may or may not have more basic survival on their minds with neglectful parents at home and can't devote the mental power to things like reading).

I'm sure, like most things, it's a little bit of everything. Sydney (and Kara's son, and the kids of everyone I personally am friends with) seem like smart kids to me, each in their own way. I'm sure other toddlers can point to a word on a page once the word has been given to them. But I'm not sure a mama who isn't in early childhood education would think to ask her toddler to do such a thing, and having done it, would have fancy words like "one to one correspondence" to go with the action. But mostly, I think kids in general are amazingly intelligent creatures and if all of my students had all of the things Sydney was born into, they would also be able to do all of the things my sweet daughter can do, maybe not by two and half (because I do think she's a little advanced in her pre-reading skills), but certainly well before starting Kindergarten.