James has been reading since early January (as in, reading sentences in short stories, not just single words - which he'd been doing for the first half of the school year), but because he is not a performer, he refused to let me take video (and as much as I am a paparazzi mama, I do honestly follow my kids' wishes if they tell me they don't want me to photograph or video tape them). Now that he's been reading more confidently for the past couple of months (I took this video in mid-February, but forgot about it until I saw an awesome video of Will reading today - he just turned 5 and he already reads like a pro!), he agreed to let me record part of a homework session (reading for 15 minutes from one of his school books). I had him read this whole book that night (15 pages or so, with 5-6 different stories in it), and it was his first time going all the way through it (he'd received it at school that day). I ended up cropping the video to the last 2 pages since Blogger doesn't allow long videos. It's been interesting to see the progression from the "I Learn to Read" book series to the "I Do Read" book series over the past few months. Whereas before they had at most one sentence per page and similar words throughout the sentence, they're more like short stories now with bigger words and greater variety, and similarities between stories, yet with enough differences to intentionally trip the kids up if they're not focusing well (for example, the previous story used a kid named Jack, so James immediately said Jack when it was actually Jake in this story). Before having a kindergartner of my very own, I wondered how in the world teachers help kids learn to read - it just seems like such a huge and daunting task. It's been fun to follow the process from recognizing letters and sounds, to learning blends, to sounding things out, to memorizing sight words, to learning the difference between short and long vowels (and how to mark them... it took Jay and I a while to realize that's what James was doing when he marked up random sentences, before the worksheets for it started coming home - oops). Hopefully everything that WE'VE learned this past year will help us make the process even easier for Cora (who, by the way, is trying her darndest to be just like James, but she has a long way to go still - she knows some sight words and loves to "read" along with Wallykazam and our Phonics DVDs, but she's in the "learning to sound things out" phase and still has some work to do before she can move up). Anyway, we're very proud of James and think he's doing great!
1 comment:
His smile at the end says it all. Super proud of himself! It's kind of daunting teaching them to read, but when they start doing it themselves...makes it all worth it. Plus, now that Will has realized that he can read some of his Lego books, he's now asking for new ones. LOVE it.
Post a Comment