Do you like Green Eggs and Ham?

This afternoon when I picked Porter up from school his teacher said she was doing some spring assessments with the kids.  She told me he identified all his letters (she knew we already knew this from fall conferences) and that he knew all of his letter sounds as well.  She told me that she thought he was probably read to tackle some beginning reader books if I had any at work from working with my students. Porter has been picking up new words he can read here and there, and when we read books after I read each page I usually ask him to find a certain word on the page and he's able to do that.  However, I've never really pushed to try reading with him.  This is mostly because pretty much any "learning" thing I attempt at home ends up being a whining power struggle between the two of us.

Tonight was no exception.  I decided we'd try an easy reader book.  I dug through his bookshelf and didn't find anything I felt was easy enough.  Then I remembered we had a shelf of Dr Seuss books and found Green Eggs and Ham.  We probably have read it 2 or 3 times in his whole life (I know that sounds awful, but we have SO many books I'm not sure we've read any single book more than 10 times each).  

We started out great... I Am Sam.   Sam I Am.  Simple, right?  Got his confidence up.  And then BAM.  Out comes the whining, defeated, I-can't-do-it-its-too-hard-and-I'm-not-even-trying attitude.  I know this may sound mean but I actually had to nearly yell at him to knock it off.  And immediately he huffed and got down to business tackling each word and its sounds.  He did SO SO good for his first time reading!  We took turns, each of us reading a page, and we got through about half of the book and I knew he was getting tired and overly frustrated so we quit on a good note.

I can't believe I have an emerging reader on my hands!  He is getting too too old.  How do I slow time down?  I'm so excited, though, that he's doing so well already.  I'm excited to go into work tomorrow and raid our emergent literacy books and bring a few home for bedtime story tomorrow night!