Definitely a Contender

If there's a contest, Jacob wants to win it. Whether it's barging ahead of his sister on the way down the stairs, or being the first one to spot a live animal on an Arizona mountain trail for the privilege of getting the first bite of dessert (thanks, Nana), Jacob will do his darndest to win.

Perhaps the school officials at Linden Elementary know this about Jacob, because this week kicked of the "read-a-thon" in which kids compete to see who can read the most minutes over a several week period. On Friday, when Jacob came home with all the information about the "read-a-thon" in his folder, Jacob insisted that he read to me. And read to me. And read to me.

He read to me on the couch, at the dining room table, and standing up in the kitchen while I made dinner. He read Oh the Places You'll Go (a really hard book, by the way), Go Dog Go, and 3 of the stories in Mercer Mayer's Little Critter Series. He wanted to put the number of minutes he read down on each individual slip of paper, but I suggested we keep a log of his minutes and turn in a slip of paper ever few days. Here you can see how many minutes he logged the first day.

My mom taught first grade for 16 years, and if I remember correctly one reason she liked to teach this age is that it was amazing to see kids learn to read. I've been thinking about this as I watch Jacob. Suddenly he sees words all around him, and he tries to read them, like the "latch" directions on Casey's car seat, and the PARKING sign we passed in the car the other day, and the PNC Bank sign, which he tried to read phonetically. It's more like alchemy than learning, and maybe that's what my mom loved about it all those years.

One last note about reading; watching Jacob learn to read I often joke that I am very glad I don't have to learn how to read as an adult, because the whole process looks really hard. I was reading in Parade magazine last week about journalist Bob Woodruff's war wound recovery process (in an article written by his wife), and how difficult, in fact, it was for him to learn to read as an adult recovering from serious brain trauma. I guess my joking isn't really all that funny. It turns out learning to read is exactly as hard as a looks.