Saturday, February 04, 2012

Reading Report

We are diligently plugging away with the Headsprout reading program. For the most part Jake makes it look easy. Viva continues to guess, guess, guess which slows her down. Despite her obstinacy, she is learning and making good progress.

Every ten lessons or so the program introduces a new group of consonants and words. At the start of that group of ten lessons, everyone struggles. Jake and Viva have a hard time with the newly introduced words. The adults must strive to stay patient and encouraging. As the twins do the next set of lessons, they learn the words and it becomes easy again. We forget they struggled a few lessons ago and are amazed at how well they are doing.

Each new set of words gets a little easier for Jake. He knows what to do--sound them out. He has to learn the new consonant sounds and the new letter combinations (and, ing, ake, ike), but he does that fairly quickly and everything goes well.

Viva puts us through a torturous process wherein she guesses and laughs and stalls and tells us she doesn’t like this or that part of the reading program. Then she finally decides to learn the sounds and everything goes much better. Until the next new set...when the cycle repeats.

Being obstinate is a good quality in some areas of life. That's what I tell myself.

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