My 4 year old taught herself to read... but failed swimming lessons

OK... I'm not one of those "my kid is brilliant" or "my kid is gifted" or whatever... Really... I'm not. Having said that.... my 4 year old is brilliant... she taught herself to read... TO READ!

Here's the deal.... she's watched a Leap Frog DVD since she was very young and was able to say her alphabet and sounds before she was 2.... you know... "The A says ah, the A says ah, every letter makes a sound, the A says ah" So, from that she knew the sounds. I spent a little bit of time with her showing her how to put the sounds together, and for awhile now she's been able to read for simple words, as long as they stuck with the correct phonics... so... words like Pop, Stop, next, etc she could read because the phonics stayed true and the word made sense. Other than that, we never really spent much time with her "teaching" her to read.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, she just started busting out reading whole books... even when the phonics didn't match up quite correctly. At first, I kind of chalked it up to half memorization (of books we've previously read to her) and educated guesses from what she knew... but then she just kept reading and reading and reading -- new books, long books, etc.

Anyway, She just finished reading "War and Peace" and greatly enjoyed it... OK... so maybe not War and Peace... but she's definitely reading Curious George, Dr. Seuss and other books all by herself.

Now... we proceed from "my daughter is brilliant" to ..... "my kids failed swimming lessons"...

That's right... they (Reagan and Luke) failed. Their inability/unwillingness to put the head underwater for 3 seconds has kept them from progressing. In fairness to them, apparently their whole class failed.

No worries, though. I told them to tell anyone that asked that they "didn't fail"... rather, that "their mother held them back"... I remember those 13 year old kids in my third grade class would always say that and that seemed to sound better.