Most of the time when I mention that the Sita is reading the Little House on the Prairie books or now the Chronicles of Narnia, the first question they ask is, "Yes, but is she understanding it?"
Now, she probably isn't understanding all the symbolic or allegorical aspects of the Chronicles of Narnia, but is she understanding the basic stories? Yes, definitely! Since she is almost always making up some story out loud, it is easy to listen to her stories to see what she's been reading lately because she pulls from those to make up her own. For a while, she named one of her dolls Charlotte and they had a lot of fever and ague and eating of cornmeal mush. Now she's into talking animals and alternate realities although we've also had a lot of Fairies (the Rainbow Fairy books), Dragons (How to Train Your Dragon), and Owls (the Legend of Ga'Hoole). =)
As another proof of her reading comprehension, the Dude has been taking pretests in prep for the STAR testing next week and bringing them home to show how well he's doing on them. There are a lot of stories on them for the reading comprehension bits and I saw Sita reading one of them this morning. So I asked her all the questions that were connected with that story and she verbally answered them correctly and only needed the "multiple choice" options to guess it right a couple of times. Once she realized she got all of them right, she wanted to try the rest of the practice tests. And she totally passed. Only on one story did she get any wrong at all.
The Dude was a little jealous of her doing as well as HE did on the tests, so we got to have a nice chat about how someone doing as well as you at something does not take away from you doing well and you don't need to feel threatened by it. I'm sure we'll have this chat at least a few more times. It is something I have to remind myself of every once in a while.
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