Light reading

Our cardboard supplies were dwindling dangerously. Nary a superhero mask had been made in recent times, and the days of the robot costume were well nigh forgotten. We almost thought we might have to go and buy some large item of furniture in IKEA, just so that there would be box fodder for young Monkey to demand we make things out of.

B fished a copy-paper/moving box out of the basement, to forestall such drastic measures. He started to make the lid into a shield, as requested, one morning before work, but it was left half finished and then was somewhat dismantled by Mabel, who enjoys dismantling things. Luckily, my friend Anonymous came to the rescue. (That's her name. It always says so right there in the comments.) Let's call her Ano for short. She came over for a playdate on Monday - except that her daughter was in summer camp, so it was a very calm and quiet playdate compared to the normal sort. And while I was upstairs putting Mabel down for her nap, Ano fashioned for Monkey the most wonderful shield, and sword - of his design, he'll have you know - ever.

Monkey spent the rest of the day exclaiming over Ano's brilliance, and telling us how much better at making cardboard shields she was than Daddy, who was even more in the ha'penny place, as my mother would say, than usual, after this event. (Daddy is regularly judged to be "medium" in the greatness stakes. Mabel and I are the best Mabel and Mummy (respectively) he's ever had, but Daddy is just about medium. Poor Daddy. Of course, the joke here is that then I have to respond "I'm the only Mummy you've ever had", and then everyone falls about laughing. He's lucky he has a two-year-old to appreciate his jokes. She's the perfect audience, really.)

Anyway, the next morning, Daddy was found useful enough, begrudgingly, to be employed writing "KNIGHT" in various places, as directed, on the back of the shield. In case the user should be in any doubt about his occupation, I suppose, so he could just take a quick look from whatever angle he happened to be at in his vigorous slaying of foes, and read his job description right there.

Later that day I heard Monkey trying to sound out the letters - though of course, he knew it was supposed to say knight, but he was making an effort to read it. Knight is probably the worst possible word he could have chosen to start reading with - unless he'd tried "psychic" or "slough" or "onomatopaeia", perhaps.

So I sat down and wrote a list of words he would know that rhymed with "knight" and had the same -ight ending: fight, might, right, night, light, sight, and flight. And showed him how you couldn't sound out each letter, but you could learn to recognise that all these words went together, and then you just needed to figure out the initial sound to read them. He started to get the hang of it.

We went on to do some simpler lists: cat and other -at words; dog and other -og words. Mabel wanted in on it too, of course, but Monkey was the one really taking things in. Today at lunchtime I heard him pick up the page (which I had left nonchalantly on the coffee table) and start reading through, working mostly from memory and partly from sounding out. After every word, he'd pop his head around the door and tell me, excitedly, "I just read 'fight' all by myself!"

He's not an early reader, and I suspect Mabel will pick this all up much faster than he does, but it's so nice to see him start to put it all together, one painful letter at a time.