Learning words

B is so brave. He has started going to a new school close to our new house. B has been amazingly adaptable. He says "My new school has transportables and it has stairs and I like it. The whole class is my friend."

B's enthusiasm to learn is remarkable, but his new school thinks his literacy skills are not up to (their) speed.  (They conducted several tests with him to gauge where he is at.) So to help his literacy development I have been doing some word activities with him at home. I am just trying to make words fun and interesting to him.

To learn some words groups we adapted an activity from here. With letters written on cut down post it notes and a word ending like 'ake' written at the top of the page. I asked B to make as many real words as he could by trying out the post it notes in front of the word ending. So B was able to make the words, brake, cake, make, rake, shake etc.

I was surprised by how much he enjoyed this game. His delight at discovering a real word when he sounded out the letter and ending together was priceless, he almost would jump with excitement.

To combine his love of learning with his love of eating I used a compete set of sight words or Dolch words from here and asked him to read each word for a piece of Nutrigrain cereal. He loved this and it wasn't difficult for him at all.

So to up the ante I then got him making sentences with a select group of words. At first he really enjoyed making nonsense sentences that didn't make any sense, he would crack up laughing as he read them out. 

But I persisted and eventually got him to make a sentence that worked...


But that just wasn't as much fun.

To have his new school tell me that B is behind in his literary development was a bit of a shock. I was extremely happy with B's reading progress and his previous teacher at the old school. The testing concerned me greatly as it felt like it was going to pigeon hole B. To me testing holds the underlying assumption that everyone develops at the same rate. Which any mother knows is not true. Children grow and develop differently. However I can hardly get upset about B now getting extra classroom help with reading and writing, we live in a competitive world after all.

But something I doubt B's test looked into was thinking.

My son has amazing thinking. B's attitude rocks. He is so creative and thoughtful, not just about his school work, but also about life, like thinking through consequences, developing theories on how things work, or coming up with inventions. Just this morning B told me he was going to invent a car that didn't need any fluids or even solar power. He said, "I'm going to invent a car that works on power like Daddy's watch."

Daddy's watch works with kinetic power.
Now that's a really clever thought....