Reading to Her Brother?

We've been having a bit of a rough time here.  Our neighbors have been complaining about everything.  We don't live in an expensive neighborhood where the apartments are well sound proofed.  In truth, we hear a lot of noise from the neighbors downstairs, and they hear every step we make on our floor.  They've done nothing but complain about my children making noise and shaking the whole house, even when they're just walking, or happen to be sitting down looking at books, or doing school work.  As a result, I've taken to checking on my children several times each day if they aren't sitting down with me.

Just the other day I was doing this when I heard my daughter tell her brother, "Let's read Madeline together!"  They sat down on the bed and she started turning the pages and reading each.  Many of the sentences are fairly short, so it should be a pretty easy read for her.  When I finally walked in the room, she said, "Oh, I was just telling him what I remembered it saying in the movie."  As much as Madeline had many of the opening lines in the book in the movie, I know my daughter hasn't seen the movie recently enough or frequently enough to have it memorized.  However, she's been spending so much time trying to convince me that she can't read that I'm starting to catch on.  I'm not as clueless as she seems to think!

I played a little game with her.  I asked her to say it without the book in front of her.  She couldn't do it.  She said she needed the pictures to remind her.  I gave her the book back and paid very close attention to what her eyes did on the page.  Yes, they looked over the picture first, but then they dropped to the little black words at the bottom of the page and showed all the classic patterns of reading!

Silly girl, you can't fool me!  I don't know why it is she wants to pretend she can't read, and we'll go with it for a little bit longer, but I'm smarter than all of that.  I know she can read.  I think now it's just a matter of getting her to love it enough that she won't want to hide her ability to read!