"He's a 2-year-old, and he 'reads'!" by Braggy McBraggypants

For awhile now we’ve marveled at how Kostyn delights in “reading” his books to us. For example, the last time we were at the library I picked up a book about animals called “What We Do.” I read it to him once a day for about a week. Then one night he requested it: “What We Do?” he said, and it took me a minute to understand it was a book he was talking about.

That night when I started reading it he interrupted me, wanting to say the words himself. “We are worms and we wiggle,” he said. “I’m a caterpillar. I creep.” I was surprised, but turned the page.

“I’m a fish and I swim. We are lambs...we leap.” He read every page! (To clarify, his pronunciation was pretty questionable on some of it, but he said the main words of every sentence.)

Goes to show how attentive and observant a toddler is, because if someone had hid the words on each page I wouldn’t have gotten them all right, the way he did.

The next night he started acting out the motions, something Chris and I later realized neither one of us had taught him. “I’m a mouse and I scurry,” he’d say, wiggling off my lap to shuffle his feet in tiny little steps all around the room. Then he’d climb back up onto my lap to read the next line. “We are ants and we march...” he’d say, wiggle down to the floor, march around the room. The back up to the lap.

A-do-ra-ble.

So that’s been his way of “reading,” and it really is precious. Anyway, we’ve had a set of Thomas the Train books sitting on his bookshelf since, well, his birth. Each book is a different color with a different train featured on front (Gordon the Something Engine, Percy the Whatchamacallit, Toby Blah Blah, I clearly don’t know them....). My sister-in-law Annette gave them to him when he was a baby, saying, “Someday you’ll love these.” And that day has come.

Just this past week, out of the blue, he’s wanted to read those books, a different one each night. I still haven’t read any of them to him (I tried once about a year ago and it was clear he wasn’t old enough yet to be captured by the illustrations or the story) but Chris has been reading one to him each night for the last few nights. Kostyn has never seen the cartoon or any other Thomas books, so this is a whole new train world for him.

Two nights ago Chris noticed Kostyn knew what each book was. “No read TOBY!” he said when Chris picked up the “Thomas” book. Last night Kostyn emphatically requested “Percy,” thrusting the correct book at his Daddy, who’d never actually read the “Percy” book to him.

“How do you know this one’s Percy?” Chris asked him, curious.

Kostyn stared at the cover for a moment before pointing. “P-E-R-C-Y. This spells Percy.”

When I came into the room a few minutes later to kiss him goodnight, Chris relayed this to me and we stared at each other blankly for a full minute.

Is it possible for a kid to teach himself to read?