The other day, on a whim, Sara started asking Ollie what letters he heard in words. “What do you think BOAT starts with? Ba ba ba boat.” If she asked him letter by letter, he could guess all of the letters. This may seem like a trivial thing, but I think it had never really occurred to him that he could figure out how to spell things. He knows how to write letters, and he often asks us how to spell things so he can write them down, but it was the doing it himself part that had not occurred to him.

So a couple of days went by, and they played this game a few times. All was right in the kingdom. We also hung up the Halloween decorations.

One day, Ollie pointed to one of the decorations and said, “Why doesn’t ‘Boo’ have a ‘b’ in it?” “That doesn’t say ‘Boo’,” replied Sara. “What do you think it says? Sound it out.” I don’t know what she expected him to say, but what he said was, “Sss Sss Sss puh puh ooooo kuh kuh spooky!”

I don’t know who was more surprised, Sara or Oliver. It’s like a lightbulb went off in his head, like he thought “I know this! I know how to do it!” Again, he had all the skills, but he had never tried to put them together before. He didn’t believe he was reading, that that’s all reading is, but once we convinced him he was pretty excited that he could read, “just like Evie”.

He’s also been writing a bit on his own now. At school he “wrote down the number of people who got wet outside”. As you can CLEARLY READ, the answer is 5: