Thursday, September 16, 2010

home ... work

The Kiddo's new teacher sent home the weekly class letter on Monday. In it she wrote that this week they are starting their reading program, the goal is 20 minutes a night. She says it doesn't have to be the kids reading to themselves, but that they can work on letters, play games (that have letters in them) or have their parents read to them. I thought that was a little silly, if the goal is to work on the kids reading then shouldn't the KID be reading? Of course it's just possible I'm biased (since the Kiddo can read fairly well). At any rate every afternoon he does his own reading, out loud, sitting next to me, for 20 minutes. It's a good feeling and one of my favorite parts of the day.

In addition his teacher said that this week they are working on writing their names. The Kiddo is great at writing when it's the upper case letters, but he struggles a little with lower case. That's my fault, I didn't make him work on them before. At any rate every day this week we've done home made name worksheets. I printed out some lined paper (kindergarten spacing helps) and wrote his name on the top line. He writes his name four times to finish filling out the paper.

Tuesday as we began this exercise I reminded him that the first letter of his name is a mommy letter (capital) but that the rest are all baby letters (lower case). His response: "that's right, the first letter is the mommy, and the rest have to be babies so she can carry them"

Yep, he definitely has an imagination. But if it helps him then it's a good thing, and it does help... it reminds him that the baby letters have to be smaller as well as lower case or they'll be too heavy for the the mommy letter to lug around.

1 comment:

C said...

In the context of teaching a kid to read it seems funny to have someone else doing the reading, but ...

Keep in mind that some people teach to the test. If the skill set needed to get into kindergarten is to read and write letters and write one's name, then those people have only taught their kid letters and his/her name. It's quite possible there's at least one kid in the class who has no idea that stories can be read instead of watched on a video.

Thoughts...

Thoughts Become Things; Choose The Good Ones.