Anyone care to guess how many books Will has been read over the course of his 3-1/2 years? My quick estimate was around 7,000, although it's probably more than that. Some time ago, he started picking up on parts of the books we read him a lot - we would read the first four words in a line, and he'd finish it off. Then he was able to recite pages with 6-8 words.
Last night, about five minutes after I put Will down "to bed," he runs to the top of the stairs and says "Daddy! I read the last page of the dinosaur book all by myself!" To which I said "That's great buddy, now go back to bed."
Only this morning did I realize what he was getting at. Basically, he was able to recite/paraphrase about two-thirds of the final two pages of his dinosaur book, which was four sentences long. Pretty good! What's interesting is which words he skipped over, and which words he swapped out for other ones.
Now, this was about the fifth take of this we'd tried tonight, because of my own ineptitude with our new camera, and he was rushing a bit. But he did it again slower later and it's easier to understand ... although without seeing the words in front of you, you probably won't understand much of what he's saying.
It's fascinating to watch. Given that he doesn't really have total command over all 26 letters or their relationship to one another, there's no way he could be "reading" those pages. So does that mean he "memorized" the text? Or did he just pick it up from others reading it to him? Keep in mind, this is a book he got for Christmas, not one that we've read 300 times like Goodnight Moon.
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