by answering the door to the speech therapist still in your mismatched pjs, you’d think it could only get better. Sadly not 🙁
Small thoroughly enjoyed playing lots of games with her. He will have a go at signs, yet to see if he’s aquiring any permanently. No sounds though, although I get the impression that most of what she is doing is groundwork. She says that often working with young children you spend quite a lot of time working on concentration span and getting them to understand the games, but he doesn’t have any problems in those areas.
She can’t come for a couple of weeks now though, so it’s back to “mummee, mummeee” being the sum total of communication I suspect.
Anyway, that took up most of the morning, and then I eventually managed to drag all of us out to Chesterfield, medieval market day. Didn’t see very much of it as it was very loud – since when did medieval markets have stereos and mechanised rides? We did wander over to the encampment and looked at the armour and weapons, then toddled off with Sarah and co for a drink. Round about that time, Small started to get a bit subdued, and when I picked him up he felt kind of warm to the touch.
He coped with playing with all the noisy toys while Big took nearly half an hour choosing a pack of beads in the bookshop, then dozed on the way home, flaked out in front of the tv for a bit, didn’t eat tea and at bath time, screamed the place down when I tried to pick him up to put him in the bath. His temp had gone up a bit it seems. So calpol and an early night for him.
Big came down, mooched around for a bit, then found a bob book and read that to me. I don’t know what if anything I’m supposed to do to facilitate reading on top of this – it seems to be a pretty slow process though.
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9 responses to “When you start the day”
hope you’ve not had too much of a bad night then, and that Small is feeling better this morning.
wrt reading – as far as I can work out, practice makes perfect, and that’s the sum total of my wisdom on the subject, 3 readers down the line. But Abbie doesn’t seem to have realised that! Joe’s doing a bit better – I try to encourage him to read things that he thinks will be harder, and I read every other page (or something like that) so that he doesn’t have the ‘volume’ to read … but I’m stabbing in the dark really!
I think it *is* a slow process, at this age, anyway. Perhaps if they left it until later it would be faster. But I just constantly remember the last class of Yr 3 children that I was involved with on teaching practice, their reading abilities were wildly varied, and many of them only had the chance to read two pages of an ORT book every other day – so whatever my kids get it’s got to be better than that!
hope small is feeling better today. I take it you’re not off to wyhec camp?
I think it has periods of acceleration and plateau this learning to read thing. I encourage Pip to choose books that are easy for her because she enjoys it more, this approach hasn’t hindered her progress 🙂
Has your comments box grown recently?
Might pop up for the day tomorrow Kirsty, understand Jan is thinking of going along then, but no, not camping. Still up in the air about interviews – one hasn’t been rearranged yet, and I just can’t get my head around camping this week 🙁
Not that I know of Heather!
Sarah, I’ve been doing read every other sentence with Big (which works out to read every other page in several of the books we’ve got 😉 ) which has the added benefit that she’s working out what a sentence is! We tend to end up with 20 – 30 mins reading a day, just wondering if that’s enough practise…but really, I’m just doing what she wants, so it’ll have to suffice I suppose.
Gods, that is a lot more than Fran got – 10 minutes was all she could stand. All i can say though is that now its coming, its coming with almost no help and the progress has been remarkably fast.
Big is still way ahead of Maddy anyway.
yep, I’d say 20 – 30 mins is plenty, especially if it’s every day, give or take. Because there’s actually plenty of other reading that goes on in a day apart from the concentrated practise!
Good idea about the sentence thing though, we’ll have to give that a try!
I hope Small is ok now. I have been feeling grotty with some kind of throat thing, and our P has had a cold. Seems very unfair for there to be grotty germs in summer.
I think different people probably learn to read in very different ways – but there might be some common phases. Our L has just hit the point where he can’t help but read when we are out in the world – things like pub signs, or advertisements. He now reads books in his head and so we have little way of knowing how much he is getting right. But we are just trusting that he is getting on with it now. We did a similar thing with our P – stopped asking her to read aloud when it seemed a bit intrusive or patronising.
But I think our L took longer to make the leap from being able to decode a lot of words, to actually reading. He was able to work out some words for about a year, I think, before he really started flying with it. I don’t think this is because of anything we did differently – and it probably doesn’t matter anyway.
I think the biggest influence of all in our house has been the sheer value we all place on books, and reading generally. I am sure that, when that is the case in a home, most kids will use the general idea that reading is a good and admirable skill at least as much as any one-to-one helping time to actually learn to read.
Hope Small feels better soon. C very rarely reads to me now because she is happy reading to herself but 30-30 mins is a damn sight longer than she ever got at school, or even at home at that point because she was too tired when she got home. I think just talking to her about what she is reading ie about the story, what did you think about what so and so did or what do you think might happen next is plenty.
I think follow the child is all I could say about the reading.
My big is a brilliant and keen reader at the moment and she learned very,very,fast at six and a half.
She just semed to know lots of it already…..it was what i always call magical.
Same happening to some degre with shiny too.
He will be 8 next week and he has just come to reading in his own way.
It has always been as chief encourager that I have had a job,as far as reading/writhing/maths….life….