Bullets of I love reading to MM

• He always asks questions that Rowling answers in the very next sentence.


• He really pays attention and anticipates what might happen next.


• He loves when I use different voices for different characters and thinks my Professor Trelawney is spot-on.


• Some words he has asked the meaning of: smirk, sneer, vaguely, tatty, briefcase, shabby, disdain, disgust, loathing, mutter, vulture, orb... (Extra credit, class! What chapter did we read last night?)


• He got really excited when he realized that the creature on the cover was a hippogryph.


• He loves to discuss with me the proper pronounciation of the magic words. Here's an excerpt of an actual conversation we had last night:

"I think they're short "u"s, Mom, because there's no silent E
or other helping vowel. See? It's CVC!"*

"But I think it's a long u followed by a short u, because it's
CVCVC! So the second u makes the first u say its name."

• Sometimes he asks me to point to what I just read and then reads it again himself, trying to use my inflections.


• He knows I know he could read the books himself**, "But you read faster than I do and besides, I don't know what all the words mean and I like when I can ask you."

*The stuff he's learning in first grade is awesome. He has to divide his spelling words up into categories: CVC (consonant/vowel/consonant), CVCe (consonant/vowel/consonant/silent e), CVVC (consonant/vowel/vowel/consonant), and Oddball. On his spelling tests, he has to mark the long and short vowel sounds. I NEVER had to do this. He's also doing sentence corrections. I don't remember doing that in school, either. With my dad at his job, yes. At school, no.

**He's reading the latest Magic Treehouse book for independent reading at school.