Continuing to read Hardy Boys and having great fun. We are googling frequently for world-knowledge, which slows us down but gives Haroun small breaks. He’s reading more than he realizes.
This Hardy Boys book (‘Burned’) takes place in a school that Haroun can relate to. The kids are a bit older than he is, which is far more interesting than books about younger kids. They are doing familiar things, like playing Dodge Ball and being awkward around girls. It is perfect.
One of our new words today was ‘duel’, and we acted this one out: Haroun and I stood back to back, walked 10 paces, turned and opened fire. We looked at how we can play a CD on a laptop and then burn a perfect copy. We explored strange expressions like “Kill two birds with one stone.”
Googling world-knowledge opens a wider world of age-appropriate books. Your child may find reading boring because knowledge gaps make an interesting text opaque and books for younger kids ARE boring. Obviously there are too many facts in the world to teach this way, but with a bit of help your child may still become an enthusiastic reader, and reading is how we develop world knowledge.
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I keep pushing Haroun on small function words – he will rush over easy words like “It was as if I were ….” in his hurry to find a hard word, and lose the meaning of the sentence. But his decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and prosody (expressiveness of reading) are steadily improving, and I have no worries.
Haroun did something today that delighted me. When I read, I try to use different voices and over-the-top expressiveness. In his side of today’s reading, a teacher said something and Haroun used a different voice. Fantastic.
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Haroun has a ‘summer job’ at a camp that started yesterday. We cut short yesterday and today – an hour of reading and nothing else – so that he could suss the camp out . I think we’ll be back on track for longer sessions by later this week, through a combination of starting earlier and only joining camp around noon.
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