Ella has been asking to do her daily reading to herself, rather than out loud to me. They are chapter books (the Rachel-and-Kirsty Rainbow Fairy books which I loathe, but she loves).
She doesn't often ask for help with words, so I know she is skipping some, which I would help her with if she'd read it out loud.
But at the same time, I do know that she's reading, not pretending to read. I can see that.
So...do I make her do any out-loud reading, or just leave her be? I leave her be, right? And forget making her read out loud for now. Right? Anyone have arguments pro or con? My gut says let her just read as she likes for now. But I am open to other reasoning on this.
I would love to get her to where she just picks up a book for pleasure. Madison was way beyond that by this time. (Sorry, can't help comparing.) Anyway, that, more than anything, tells me to let her do it in her own sweet way or I'll crush any emerging love of reading out of her.
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6 comments:
Reading is great! So tough to decide. I like what you've been doing. When my older kid gave me a hard time about reading outloud, I would insist on her reading outloud just once or twice a week. With those chapter books that's probably often enough to catch most of the oft-repeated vocabulary.
Sounds great. I hope I can get my soon-to-be 2nd grader to actually READ!! She knows a lot of the rules but needs way more practice and even more rules.
Deb
I have 7 year old twins, and this is how I handle things.
They have to read silently for an hour a day. I ask them to write down any word that is unfamiliar to them. After they've finished reading I sit with them and help them look up the word (or work it out from the roots they already know), then they write out the definition. Ideally, they should look up words while they are reading, but if they do that, they don't enjoy reading.
They also read out loud to me every day - we do about 20-30 min of read aloud as part of the school day. They also like to read when DH and I do family reading, so in our home, we all take turns to read out loud.
I have a summer reading program in place. they earn a penny for each page they read, 50c for each oral book review they do with me (I ask questions about plot development and themes etc), plus 75c for each 10 unfamiliar words they define. The children have a goal in mind so are reading up a storm. they want to earn $100 by the end of summer.
It's made a huge difference to their reading. Ben was just skipping the words he didn't understand. I also found out that he's lazy about breaking words into syllables, so he was skipping words he was too lazy to work out. Now that he has to look up unfamiliar words, he is taking the trouble to sound out longer words and is discovering that he actually knows the word.
Kim, my two are also going into second grade. When I was that age, you could not get my nose from a book. It is one of my great disappointments that my children are not bookworms (yet). I am hoping that all they need is practice. Hopefully once they are more fluent, they'll read for pleasure. Right now Shira is reading all of Beverly Cleary's books. I need to find an author that will inspire Ben.
Shez at Homeschooled Twins
For Ben, think about the Time Warp Trio from Jon Scieszka, specifically "Summer Reading is Killing Me." Great for cultural literacy. Plus, 7-to-9-year-old boys find it really funny, I am assured by my favorite children's librarian. It's in the middle of the Time Warp Trio's series of books, so after that he might be inspired to go back to the beginning of the series. But Summer Reading is Killing Me can be read alone. And it would work well with the theme of your summer!
I'm off the library as soon as I am done with writing this comment. Thanks for the recommendation.
I forgot to comment earlier about those hideous fairy books. At least they are not as dreadful as the Fairy Chronicles. The FG's put me over the edge. They were so politically correct and sanctimonious that I felt ill reading them.
We haven't read those, thank goodness. Will steer clear. Thank you.
The Disney Fairies are more complicated books than the Rainbow Fairies, but pretty awful, too. We heard a couple on audio after someone gave Ella the first book for Christmas or something. Gack. There were at least two points where I couldn't help making a barely-suppressed retching sound as I was driving. Madison was amused.
I'm late on this conversation, but I'd vote for letting her read silently. Even as she's skipping over a word here and a word there, she's seeing the shape of the words. After enough exposures, some will start to seem familiar, which will lead her to pay attention to them more, which will probably lead her to figuring out what the words mean and then to connect them to words she has heard or is hearing spoken. Research almost always shows that the most important thing to developing reading (and other language skills) is a lot of exposure to language, and between living in a literate household, reading to herself, and listening to audiobooks (which have a lot more impact on vocabulary development than a lot of people give them credit for), she's getting that. Within the last couple years, I read a study that said it takes thirty exposures to a word to make it part of our working vocabularies, which seems about right to me.
For another perspective, I know that I VASTLY preferred reading silently to myself as a child because it was so much faster than reading aloud. :) I always wanted to know where the story was going.
I love Shez's idea of having the children pull vocabulary from the texts they're reading silently.
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