Today as I and our 4 yos were lying in bed and I was reading to myself, he asked —
“Why can’t I hear you reading?”
Interesting coming up with an explanation a 4 yo can understand. He saw me turning pages; knew that I was reading. But words weren’t coming out like in our family read aloud times, or when I read individually to him. He sees his brothers and sisters and me reading to ourselves all the time. I wonder if he’s been thinking on this for a long time, or it just occurred to him this time, that I was reading, but he couldn’t hear anything.
His conclusion was that he can read in his head too. To which I replied, “You have to understand what the words on the page mean.”
“Oh!”
He’s already trying to keep up with learning everything his 6 yob is learning. Perhaps he’ll be an earlier reader.
But I think I’ll make sure he does a lot of oral reading to me (as I do with all our children until they are fluent readers,) to make sure he knows what those words on the page are and mean.
