Lil' Reader

I thought I would post something a little more light hearted than the last post. So today noah came home from school and pulled out his "book" bag. This is a new program for first grade this year and he is very excited about it. In previous years our "language/reading" program consisted of spelling and a reading log. This new program levels off your kids at their Just Right reading levels and they bring home three JR books for an entire week. The goal is for them to read their books, not for you to read to them...although we do both now, because we are right in the middle of Tale of Desperaux. Plus they come home with sight words that they need to practice reading and writing. All in a nice tidy little take home bag!

I will fully admit that I have not worked with Noah very much on his writing, at all. He did not sit around and draw and make up stories like his sister. So at the beginning of the year we had several "letter" practice sheets come home to work on. He is getting better and he has been writing little stories at home, which only helps him in the long run. I can tell that we have a long way to go in the spelling department, but having these sight words come home as homework has been great. We would sit down last year and work on our sight words together and since it was not homework, he really did not want to do them. But now he has no choice. So we read sentences, write them and use our sight word flash cards as homework this year.

I will say that Noah has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 6 months. I finally found several books that he loves to read, some are much higher levels than he is currently "leveled" at, but he handles them just fine. This year we let him stay up for 20-30 minutes after we put him to bed, so that he can read with his headlamp and he loves it. We have let sydnie do that since first grade and we always just read to noah before bed. But this year, he finally gets to read in bed, although I am pretty sure that he would lay upstairs and read last year (we just pretended that we did not know).

He has changed levels three times since school started and is reading at the beginning of second grade level!!! He is so excited about that. He finally found that confidence that he had been lacking. His comprehension is amazing and he knows that he can read harder books as well as the little story ones that he comes home with. He is an excellent reader and I am thankful that he loves to read so much.