Logistics necessitated that I bring my eldest child to an evening Bible Study on Thursday. For the first bit, he completed his homework but was still a distraction as he counted out his math problems on his fingers and whispered his reading work to himself. And, of course, he asked for help and needed more correction than usual.

When his homework was finished, he took to the New Testament that I had made available to him.

I had placed a post-it note paper on the page that we would study, Revelation 6. I gave him a yellow highlighter and he was delighted to write in a book, as he has seen Mommy do almost every day!

He set about, then, per his own idea, to highlight his vocabulary words, starting at the very top of the left hand page, Revelation 4:5, and got fully through the page, ending at 6:1, ironically where we were starting that evening. He might have gone further but the yellow post-it covered most of the right hand page, those narrow, economy New Testaments from American Bible Society that I used to buy for my fourth-grade CCD students every year so they would have one and we could work in it each week. And I brought extra copies to class in those days because some kids would forget to bring theirs so they would borrow for the morning as we did our worksheets. My goal was always to give them familiarity with the names of the books in the New Testament and to teach them how to look up chapters and verses. The mechanics of using the Bible. But we read Gospel stories, too.

Looking now at what he's marked, just about half the words. Wow, that's pretty good. But that doesn't mean that he can read the text ... he just knows the words; he can't string them together yet.