DD is 3Y8M. She used to love to be read from her crawling days until she turned 3. That was the time she started Pre-K3 at a Public school.
Since starting school, her interest in books has become very selective. (I don't know if correlation = causation for this, but this did kind of coincide). She has since designated for herself specific times when she’ll choose to be read to – those also happen to be the times when she prefers to sit in one place for atleast several minutes. Breakfast, drinking milk, while on bed just before sleep etc. She’s a high-energy kid and generally wants to keep moving around all the time.
From what we’ve understood of her, she seems to be more visual than auditory. Phonics don't interest her. But visuals do. She once asked me (she was 3Y2M old then) what the sign on our apartment lobby said, and I read it out for her “Please do not sit on table”. Her first response “Where is THE? Shouldn’t it be Please do not sit on THE table?” (She's highly intolerant to others' grammatical and pronunciation mistakes) And since that instant, she could read the individual words in the sentence wherever she came across them.
Her latest interest is identifying cars on the road. She asked me a few weeks ago what the H symbol in front of a car in the parking lot meant. I said “Honda. It’s the brand of the car. Every car has a symbol which tells the brand of the car.” She asked me to take her around the parking lot and tell her the names of all cars by pointing at the symbol. Now, she can pretty much identify any car on the road from its logo.
Visuals, symbols, geometric shapes, signs, marks seem to fascinate her more than plain words. If words were a part of any of those, they get registered permanently in her. If not, she either chooses not to read, or chooses not to remember.
With her new chosen pattern of reading, she likes to read books which have an intense visual message. She’s currently obsessed with Fire Ants – from the Nat Geo Kids Ants book. She sometimes randomly picks the book and asks us to read just the page on Fire Ant. Needless to mention, she sight-reads the content of that page and a few other such pages.
I’m just inclined to stick with her lead on how she wants reading to happen. She seems to have her own method and her own pace of reading. We keep getting her books that we think may interest her. Sometimes she just picks a new book and tells us “I don’t like this book.” We have no idea why. She mostly chooses not to explain when we ask. But there are other new books she instantly takes interest in.
