Jade

My ten-year-old niece, Jade, looks so young ..like a childhood version of Reese Witherspoon. She weighs only 44 pounds ..but, I have learned not to underestimate her. She can make some pretty tough inferences while reading grown-up material. She can work multiple remote devices and control the PC, IPOD, DVD and TV ..tells me which movie characters to watch out for ..pauses the movie when I leave the room momentarily ..even adjusts the lights for me when I go online. Very tuned-in. She has phonemic awareness in spades ..I could hear it while she was reading aloud and ran into words that she didn’t know ..like ‘illustrative’ All she had to do was sound out the first three phonemes: ‘i..ll..u’ to recognize they were the beginning of a word that she did know .. and said ‘illustration’ ..but she knew that wasn’t quite right and immediately came back with the right word ‘illustrative’. I think the ‘ive’ ending is what threw her ..it didn’t conform to a visual pattern that she could immediately recognize.