Our friend Jed (hi Jed!) was visiting this week-end, and we got into a conversation about learning to read. I went into my typical, just be read to a lot and absorb it through your skin (which by the way all the research shows is the best way to learn grammar, so I’m not completely crazy.) Jed was making the case that learning phonetics, how to sound things out, has some value. He has friends who make wild stabs at big words and do not have the sound-it-out tools to tackle them. I claimed that I sight read most words because my vocabulary is just so dang big, and the rest I broke down into prefixes and suffixes. I just never used that silly old b, bu, butt, butter, butterfly.

May I please now eat at least a word a day.

First it was the name of the African drum in David’s Let’s Learn to Count with Our African Friends book. Then Rose wanted to order a gluten-free English muffin from Kennikinnek. And today, I stumbled in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when we learned Mr. Potts’ first name, Caractacus.

So, bring on the vowels, bring on the blends, bring on that crazy qu (which Rose learned today), I’m ready to break it apart to put it all together.