Zach and Rissa love to watch SuperWhy!  It’s a show on PBS about 4 kids and how they solve life problems and acquire social skills by reading stories and finding out what happened to the characters.  It is super cute and super educational.  Alpha Pig, Princess Presto, Wonder Red, and Super Why use their magic powers of alphabet, spelling, rhyming, and reading to help the characters in the book they are reading change their story and get the outcome they need.  Then they apply their “super story answer” to the real life problem that they started the show with.  They are Super Readers!  I can’t tell you how many times I have referenced the show in my parenting:  “Hey, guys, remember when Wyatt was wasting water on SuperWhy?  Turn off the sink because we need to conserve water.” and “Let’s use our words to explain why we are mad instead of roaring and yelling like the Beast did (Beauty and the Beast) on SuperWhy.” and “If you are kind and ask nicely like Wolfie learned to do with Red Riding Hood, I think <insert sibling> might want to play with you.”  And so on.  It’s as awesome as it sounds.

This has led to good outcomes in my kids’ interest in reading because they want to be super readers as well as some hilarity.  The show’s repetitive phrases show up in conversation around here ALL THE TIME.  When someone doesn’t want to do something, I hear a lot of “I can’t do that.  It’s not in my story.”  And as a Super Mommy, I quickly acquire Wyatt’s magic powers and say, “Then we need to change your story!  Let’s change the word ‘can’t’ to the word ‘can!’  Zap!”  Take that, little geniuses.  Three can play at this game…

My kids can identify all their alphabet letters (that has been true for over a year) and know what sounds they make.  They are obsessed with asking, “What does that say?” every time they encounter a written word.  Instead of answering, now I say, “Let’s sound it out.  Kuh-la-or-ah-x.”  And then I wait and they say, “Kuh-la-or-ah-x… Clorox!  What’s Clorox, Mommy?”  They can read an enormous number of whole words and pepper the conversation during every drive with “That says Olive Garden!  That says Cracker Barrel!  That says Urbana!  That says Stop!  That says No parking!”  It’s fun when they pick out a whole word out of a phrase or sentence and say, “That says Off.  What is off?” and then I need to read the rest of it for them.  Then they “read” it back to me and commit it to memory.  And they are starting to sound things out.  It is CRAZY to be there as their brains explode with learning right in front of my eyes.

Lately, they have been acquiring phonemic awareness (a precursor to phonics, it means they can identify each sound in a word and separate the whole into its smallest parts).  This means that they can manipulate sounds.  Oh, we have fun with this!  Zach’s favorite sound manipulation game is changing the first letter of every word in a song or sentence to a particular letter.  So “A thankful heart is like good medicine” turns into “A zankful zart is zike zood zedicine.”  Then Rissa wants us to use R so we do “A rankful rart is rike rood redicine.”  Then we do M for Mommy and D for Daddy and N for Nathaniel and H for Hoochie.  Rissa’s favorite sound manipulation game is rhyming words.  She will say a silly rhyming word as a replacement for a word in an otherwise normal sentence and then smile at us until we catch the joke.  “Mommy, can I have a… beat?  How about a peat?  A meat?”  I always answer in turn, “Of course you can have a… sleet!”  And then she squeals, “No, a TREAT!” as if I didn’t know.

The speech pathologist part of me is always enamored with how much more interesting these language skill acquisitions are in real life rather than the dry version I studied in textbooks as a student.  The mommy part of me is always elated with how amazing my children are.  I’m so proud of their hilarity and their interest in learning.  And the jerk part of me enjoys bragging about it here on my blog.  Sorry about that jerk part. 🙂