Reading with Jen Strange

Reading stamina

At the beginning of this school year, I attended parent's night to get a sense of what Jake would be doing in 3rd grade.  One thing that really interested me was a concept I had never considered before: reading stamina.

Jake's teacher talked about how most of their mornings are dedicated to reading: a mix of phonics work, independent reading, group work, one-on-one help, language activities, etc.  Then she said that a lot of the focus for independent reading time is to build a child's reading stamina; at the beginning of the year there might be some children who can only read steadily for 5 minutes before being tired or restless or just plain DONE with it.  The goal was to gradually move those kids up until they could read independently for long periods of time.

On the fly games

Last night I was working with my 1st grade student "K" - her mom asked me to review a list of 20 sight words her teacher would be testing her on today.  She also said the teacher told her K was having trouble sounding out words . . . which left me thinking LADY, that's because you keep asking her to memorize sight words!!!! 

(I know she's most likely obligated to just follow curriculum, so it's not the teacher I'm annoyed with as much as the process.)

With many children who are trying to learn to read, every time you bypass sounding words out in favor of memorizing strings of letters, you are sending that child's learning process backwards.  Then when you try to switch back to sounding words out, the child is so confused by the guesswork involved with sight-words, she isn't sure what to do!  (This is where my theory about learning basic alphabetic code FIRST, THEN talking about sight words LATER comes from.  That's what I go on and on about in my ebook.)

ANYWAY.

Kinds of chapter books for kids

Once your child starts reading independently, you might be unsure where to start with choosing books - especially where chapter books are concerned.  Well I was at Barnes & Noble the other day (oh, how I love that place . . . ) and they make it pretty easy to differentiate between the kinds of chapter books.

The first category is "chapter books" for ages 5 - 8 or grades PreK - 3, which I would call "first chapter books."  These books typically have bigger text and often have pictures throughout the chapters.  The chapters are shorter, and the syntax is easy to read.  Books in this section often come in series, and this section is much smaller than the harder chapter books.

The other kid's chapter book category at B&N is "Young Readers," for ages 7 - 12 and grades 3 - 6.  (After that, I guess they can look in the "teen" section?)  There are SO many more options now for this reading level than when I was young - lots of seriously great series.

Amazon divides their children's books into the following age categories:
Baby - 2
Ages 3 - 5
Ages 6 - 8
Ages 9 - 12

Scholastic has the same age categories on their website.  I guess Barnes & Noble kind of splits the difference.  :)  The best thing to do is go to an actual bookstore (hopefully you have one nearby!) or library, and spend some time exploring!

Variant Vowel Spelling Test

Ok, so my favorite 2nd grader (Aowyn) has the following spelling words this week:

pay, wait, paint, cave, train, pail, whale,
away, shake, they, great, clay

So that's 5 different ways to represent the long A sound (/ae/), completely in a jumble, and a 6 year old just has to remember.  Right?

Well, not quite.

To help a child study words like this, first take a sheet of paper and make some category headers like this:

Old Maid with ABC Flashcards

This weekend while my friend and her girls were over, I got out my cardstock-printed versions of my ABC Beginner Cards and we played with them.

To right is Lorien choosing a card from my hand for Go Fish - we were using the upper and lower case matching card set.  The lower case letters have pictures, the upper case are alone.  :)  This set for shoring up understanding that each letter has two versions: an upper and a lower case.  Typically I choose 10-14 sets at a time for playing Go Fish.

The above is the picture-only version of the cards (which is initially designed for phonetic awareness activities, but can also be used for Old Maid or Go Fish or any matching game, since each picture has a pair.)

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And here is Lorien using the picture cards as intended - for each picture pair, we listen for the first and last sound of the word, then place the cards accordingly.  The first "dog" card gets placed at "d," and the second is placed at "g."  Terribly amusing for the preschool / Kindy set.  :)