He Can Do It!

Educators who study every stage of child development say that they still do not know what happens in the brain that enables a child to suddenly click into learning to read. It is still a magical thing that no one quite understands.
I have bought my boy phonetic books. I have gone over letters. He has done a year of pre-K and he is excellent at memorizing stories and telling them by heart--even turning the page at the right time--as if he is reading. And he is good at memorizing the shape of words he sees a lot: stop. milk. yes. no. theo. benji.
I have not pushed as hard as I could. I focused on exposing him to other things: bike riding, violin lessons, chess. But yesterday it happened! He started reading!
He had been doing simple sight reading flashcards from school. More like reading kanji than reading phonetically. But yesterday afternoon Benji and I put the magnetic letters back up on our new refrigerator, and I wrote a sentence: dad can pee.
Theo read it. He giggled. He couldn't believe he had read it himself. And he couldn't believe that is what it said. I put up two more (the alphabet is lacking certain letters, so the sentences were a bit strange): mom is big, i met a bug.
He read them both.
He can do it!
When did his brain figure it out? When did his brain switch from identifying shapes that are words to reading them phonetically? I don't know. But it is a miraculous and wonderful thing!