This is more than just a brief, passing phase. In the house, she crawls around looking for bowls of milk. When she takes a bath, she’s a catfish. When she gets hurt, she cries, “MeOW!”

This is serious.

I wasn’t worried until one day when she was “reading” her Bible to her little sister. She announced very clearly, “The Bible says…” (fingers pointing to chapter and verse), “Jesus will get us a cat.”

It’s not the cat obsession that worries me. It isn’t even the thought that this might lead to her first crisis of faith, when she learns that unexplained disappointments get mixed in with the miracles.

It’s that I’m not much of a cat person – I don’t really want a cat. What worries me is the nagging thought in the back of my mind that my daughter, as a child, might have more sway with Jesus than I do!

I fear…

…I’m beginning to wonder whether there might be a cat in our near future.

It’s a happy coincidence that our preschool reading program begins with a story about a cat.

Last year I discovered the Now I’m Reading series by Nora Gaydos. We’ve found it to be perfect for the very earliest readers.

Each book begins with a simple phrase. Through the first several pages, the phrase is repeated, gradually expanding into a sentence along the way. The story reaches its (happy) conclusion in the second half of each book, using slightly faster-moving sentences.

This pace is nice for my kids. It works.

The kids are not old enough, though, to advance through the whole book in a day or even in a week. We slip the book into a pocket chart and focus on one page and one new word at a time.

You can find the series here, if you want to read what happens to the poor hero of this tale told entirely in monosyllables. (P.S. Gaydos also offers several series for older readers.)

My younger daughter is still learning her letter sounds and is not ready for Now I’m Reading.

When the twins were 18 months old, Julie tipped me off to www.starfall.com. It has an interactive video for each letter, which was extremely effective. (Julie also suggested starting with the letter O. Easy to recognize.)

Rather than teaching the names of capital letters, Starfall emphasizes the sounds of lower case letters.

That makes a lot of sense, when you consider that most of the words we read are lower case, and that we generally don’t use letter names when sounding out words.

As an added bonus to Starfall… it has a cat:

If only book and computer cats could be fuzzy and would purr contentedly… We could skip the cat hair allergies and the kitty litter tracked across the floor. Something tells me this wouldn’t fulfill this recent, consuming need in my daughter, though. We’ll have to look for another way through this…

Thanks for keeping us company this morning. Here’s to a feline-free Wednesday. Or make it feline-filled, if that suits you better.