Gets Me Every Time

We're about a week into summer vacation here at the Riley house. Meg does summer school, so for the month of June, it's just me and the girls. We're having a blast, being lazy, going with the flow. It's nice to get off the conveyor belt of life for a while.

One of my favorite things about summer is the reading program sponsored by the public library. The girls get a little chart, they color in a shape for every 15 minutes they read: sea horses, seashells, you get the drift. Every 6 hours they get some sort of prize; I think the first one is a temporary tattoo. The girls are obsessed with filling in their charts, so the first week or two of summer vacation there's a lot of reading going on in the Riley house. I don't think they even care about the prizes, they just like filling in that chart, must be the sense of accomplishment. Intrinsic reward over extrinsic reward, does a parent proud.

In a departure, Scout is using a timer this year. She resets it every 15 minutes, it's pretty damn cute. Scout is a freakish reader, incredibly fast and way above grade level. She reads better than most of the 8th graders I taught this year. Quinn is coming along at a more normal pace, and I love listening to her read, helping her sound out tough words. It's really starting to click for her; I can hear the confidence growing in her voice with every chapter. Quinn has a bunch of books checked out from the library, but I doubt she'll ever get to them, we're reading The Magic Treehouse series. Quinny reads aloud to Meg and I, and we just ballpark 2 chapters=15 minutes.

Meg and I are both avid readers, so I'm not surprised the girls love to read. The thing is, I'm surprised every time I see Scout in one of her many reading spots around the house, completely lost in her own little world. I'm surprised every time I listen to Quinn sound out a polysyllabic word or use the perfect inflection with dialogue. I'm surprised how happy it makes me.