Colin's reading

Nicole and I picked out some books for Colin for Christmas. The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame (author of The Wind in the Willows) illustrated by Michael Hague (same of The Hobbit and The Wizard of Oz that we had as children, both from Meredith?), and the Mouse and the Motorcycle boxed set, by Beverly Cleary.

Colin hasn't taken any interest in these gifts yet. He also got a boxed set of Magic Treehouse books from Nicole's brother's family, and that's what he started reading, with Mom while she was here. After she left, we made it up to the first few chapters of book four, Pirates Past Noon, the final installment in the boxed set, but now we're reading Dog Man.

For his birthday, Colin got Dog Man: Brawl of the Wild from one of his school friends. Then our friend Markus gave him Dog Man and Cat Kid a few days later. His son Lukas had been invited to Colin's party, but hadn't made it. Colin seemed put off by these at first, but once he started looking at them, he developed an interest. They are books four and six in a children's graphic novel series by Dav Pilkey, author of Captain Underpants, which I have only heard of, never seen.

Colin is interested enough that he was willing to spend his Christmas money to procure the remaining four available books in the series. They're supposed to arrive tomorrow, just in time for us to finish book six. I do most of the reading, but Colin follows along with the pictures, and he has taken on the role of Li'l Petey, the eponymous Cat Kid, a kitten adopted by Dog Man in the lead up to book four. He still needs help with a lot of the words, like "millimeters", but manages some surprising ones, like "innocent", and his fluency is improving rapidly, really to a surprising degree.

We probably have a couple weeks of material left, but soon we'll be looking for more with him, too, unless we can get him interested in those Christmas gifts.