By Jack BeresfordShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberA five-year-old boy learning to read had his parents in hysterics after he started sounding out the words written on his dad’s T-shirt.
Jessica Porter-Pennington from Ohio couldn’t help but laugh as her son Gus, who is a twin, attempted to read his dad Josh Pennington’s Marvel-themed T-shirt. While she couldn’t fault his effort, Gus’s attempt proved unintentionally hilarious for reasons that will soon become apparent.
A former public school teacher who is now engaged in social work, Porter-Pennington has been impressed with her son’s progress with his reading. “Gus has a thirst for knowledge and is learning to read things that may be more advanced than other kids his age,” she told Newsweek. “It’s been amazing seeing him pick up reading so quickly and easily.”
Porter-Pennington credits her “love for education” as a key driver behind a huge decision she made before her kids started formal schooling. “I made the decision that I would primarily be homeschooling Gus and his twin sister, Henny, for preschool this school year,” she said.
Home schooling is on the rise in many states across the U.S. Last year, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Research Lab published an analysis of the homeschooling rate for 21 states for the 2023-2024 academic year. The report indicated 19 states saw an increase in the number of children being homeschooled. These increases ranged from a two percent rise in Georgia to a surge of 29 percent in Delaware. Vermont and New Hampshire were the only two states to feature in the study that reported a decrease in the number of students being homeschooled.
...While every family has their own personal reasons for wanting to home school, in the case of Porter-Pennington, it’s been about providing her twins with the best possible platform to start their learning experience from. If Gus’s efforts are anything to go by, they have started pretty well, even if it did result in this brief and undoubtedly hilarious moment of mispronunciation.
It all started in the classroom. “Last week we were working on words that end in /at/….such as ‘fat,” Porter-Pennington said. That’s where her husband’s T-shirt comes in. “My husband had been gifted a shirt from our older sons years ago that said ‘FATHOR,’ a play on the word father and nod to his favorite Marvel character, Thor,” she said.
“Gus spied the word ‘fat’ or so he thought and sounded out the second half of the word phonetically.” That means he essentially said “fat hor.” That made total sense to say to Gus, but said aloud sounded a little more risqué than either his mom or dad were expecting.
Knowing they had just experienced one of those hilarious moments as parents, Porter-Pennington was ready with her camera to record Gus’s amusing mispronunciation and his dad’s understandably amused reaction to it.
She posted the resulting clip to her TikTok @raisingthewildestflowers, where it’s now been viewed almost 10 million times already. “I shared it with my small audience on TikTok to bring a smile to their faces,” Porter-Pennington said. “Nearly 10 million views later, I think Gus has spread some early holiday cheer to many!”
More importantly, Gus has already learned a valuable lesson from the experience and moved on. “Rest assured—he has since learned the sound ‘th’ makes,” his mom confirmed.
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