Reading Stamina

Carrie Busey has a book club that started in November. Children in grades K-2 record how many minutes they read or someone reads to them, and then they turn in a sheet every 120 minutes. As X-man has been moving up in his reading from a level 6 to a level 14, the number of words per book (as expected) have been going up. Every Tuesday and Thursday parent volunteers very nicely go into the classroom and help each student in his class pick out two books. They get sheets to record how many times they read their books, and then they have to bring them back. X-man has a goal of reading each of his books twice before he returns them. They're called Baggie Books (because they come home in a Ziploc bag.)

When he read a level 6, he'd read me both of his books in one night. Now that he's moved up, I notice that he gets tired around 2/3 of the way through the book. When the books were easier, he could hold them himself and he wouldn't get distracted. Now, it works better, if I hold the book and move my finger under the words. I try to get him to do it, or to use a ruler, but he declines. But awful protests ring out if I point out that he skipped a line and that's why the story doesn't make sense.

His baggie books take him roughly 5-12 minutes to read, depending on the story. Right now he's got one about a family helping to rescue a fisherman on the beach that he breezes through and one about a family who lives near a river that has flooded their house, that he is less interested in, so it takes a while.

I'm starting to do some research on reading stamina, because when I read to him, he has giant comprehension stamina. I read a story. We talk about it. He hands me another. It goes through waves, but sometimes it's an hour a day of me reading to him. Sometimes (like if it's a graphic novel) he sits next to me or at the end end of the bed and gets really into the pictures while I read (or do sound affects, if it's a Star Wars book), but other times, if it's a picture book, he just plays quietly on the floor with something. Then he answers questions about the book at the end or he starts a conversation about it.

Sometimes, I think it's trouble, all this reading I do versus making him do. But he understands and processes the story and the ideas. And I keep reminding myself that he needs to be at a level 16 by the end of 2nd grade to be "at grade level," so he's got time to get to 16 and to pass it, even, before May. In fact, I told him when he goes back to school on Tuesday, to try a level 15, since the rescue one was so easy for him.

In my bag of tricks, I get a lot of "you read/I read" books. We started doing this when he was in kindergarten and was tired of reading to himself. So I read the parts of Gerald the Elephant in Mo Willems' Piggie and Elephant books and he was Piggie. Nowadays, I can find Usbourne books at the library that do the same thing. Right now we're reading a book about school poems that works the same way. If we read together, for whatever reason, he can go much, much longer than if he's reading by himself. In a way, I think he just likes that it's a partner effort.

But I love that we're working hard at trying, right? I mean, he loves being read to, so hopefully, one day, he'll love reading to himself as much as he loves being read to. Until then, we're turning in a blue sheet every 2-3 days at school.

The Tolono Library is also having a winter reading program, where the kids record how many minutes they read for prizes. But the trick is that he has to read to himself. He's doing pretty okay. He's averaging about 10 minutes a day, which will get him to the 300 minutes mark by the end of the club, but if he really wants a football prize, he's going to have to kick it up a notch.

Ho, Ho, Ho!

'Tis the season! And to prove it I spent all day out of my house. This morning the Rotary Club of Savoy had it's first Breakfast with Santa at United Methodist Church. We had over 100 people, and it was a giant success. We were raising money to pay for a solar-powered water tank (i.e. a very fancy latrine) for a village in Swaziland that a bunch of local churches had also adopted. I got to sit at the ticket desk while others served breakfasts, oversaw various games and assisted Santa when he came.

Afterwards, I ran up north to buy Christmas gifts at Barnes and Noble. If you lived in town, you could have shopped from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Tolono Public Library would have received a percentage of the sales from corporate BnN. You can also shop online anytime between today and Dec. 6 from anywhere and the library will benefit. More details are at www.tolonolibrary.org.

Then I went to Mas Amigos and had lunch with Freak. It had been so long since we'd hung out. We figured out that we met around 5 years ago. And it freaked us out when we realized that in another 5 years, her oldest would be driving a car. Yikes!

Then I returned to Barnes and Noble to sit at the table for the library and hand out more coupons to people who pass by. If there are any Star Wars fans out there, it looks like members of the 501st Midwest Garrison (i.e. Stormtroopers) will be there next week doing gift wrapping for charity! At least it's on their schedule online!

I headed home at 5 p.m. and had a sandwich for dinner and then got back into the car, but this time (FINALLY) with the boys. We all met up with some other children from X-man's school to see "Santa's Secret Star" at the Parkland Planetarium. X-man liked it. He said he wished it was longer.

We got home and read for 45 minutes. Most of it from me to him because it was after 9 p.m., and he was really sleepy. We're in the middle of a biography about Jackie Robinson. He's been enjoying it a lot. But he also knows that after we finish it tomorrow night, that we get to move on to the Darth Paper Strikes Back Origami Book. :-)

This Boot Is Made for Walking!

I got the blessing today to submerge my foot in water and to WALK in my boot. These are two very good things. I have to work on standing on my barefoot, but as soon as I feel comfortable with it I can transition to a lace up brace and a tennis shoe and drive short distances. So it's looking like I'll be driving by the end of the weekend, if it all goes okay.

But I don't get to start PT until after Thanksgiving. My foot needs to be comfortable walking in a shoe before I can do strength exercises. But I walked to school with MacTroll today to pick up the boys and it felt GREAT. I was 1/2 block behind them watching them play tag down the road with MacTroll, and I felt happy.

I was also happy because I finished the poster board for the science night tomorrow. X-man was really nervous about his handwriting, so he started typing some of the labels for his layers of Earth drawing. It took him 35 minutes to type 9 words. So, you know, I had him paint his volcano for the main part while I typed up the info on the two experiments, the recipes we used, the vocabulary we learned and a chart I found online of the scientific method, which was really the point of the project for us. We had a lot of fun doing science as a family, and X-man can't wait to have another science night. (I don't think he remembers that he's doing a special "Sloppy Science" program next Friday at the Urbana Rec Center from 6-7:30 p.m.)

I attended the Tolono Public Library District Board meeting last night. I came away with two cool things about the library. 1) That our subscription to Zinio, an online magazine database where you read current magazines for free, (which is free to all Tolono Library Card holders) is awesome and I can't wait to have more titles. I've been reading Consumer Reports there, which is a magazine I could never bring myself to pay for, but one that I find uber useful from time to time. There are many other titles to read, so if you live in Savoy, Tolono or Sadorus and have a library card, you should totally check it out (or get thee to Tolono for a card). If you don't, you could totally advocate for your library to subscribe to the service.

And 2) Our library is having a fundraiser at Barnes and Noble on Dec. 1 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We'll be at the door handing little slips of paper out that indicate you'd like a percentage of your purchase to be donated to the library (you can also download and print your own flyer from the library web site). You DO NOT have to be a library card member to help us out. If you're buying things from Barnes and Noble for the holidays, you just hand them the slip at check out, and they take care of it. It costs you NOTHING. But it can earn the library up to 20 percent on all purchases that day!

I'll be volunteering to hand them out after I help out my Rotary Club. This year we're hosting our first ever Breakfast with Santa at the Savoy United Methodist Church (corner of Old Church Rd. and Duncan) from 9-10:30 a.m. There will be a light breakfast (fruit, yogurt, muffins, juice) and games and activities for children. Tickets are $5 per person, but children under 18 months old are free. If you think you'd like to buy tickets, please leave a comment with how to contact you, and I can get them to you, soon. The money raised will help the Rotary fund community and humanitarian projects locally and around the world.

X-man had his OT evaluation today. He did AWESOME on the Visual Motor Integration part. She thinks he's just devised a "drawing" method of making the letter shapes rather than having actually been taught the appropriate ways to make the letters. This is probably true given the improvement in writing from his first spelling test and the one we got back 4 weeks later after we'd been doing Handwriting Without Tears. So, she'll be coming over once a week to work with him, and he's meeting with her at school for 30 minutes every Monday but with a small group of two or three other students.