Ben and Floppy

It's been a good day for languages at our house today. English first, and then Spanish (which I will have to come back to in the next post).

It got off to a very slow start though, with Ben refusing to read his 'Biff and Chip' book for school tomorrow. They use the Oxford Reading Tree literacy programme at their school and he is currently on stage 1+, or purple books as we like to call them. He'd already completed the green ones and the grey ones when all of a sudden he lost all interest in reading. :S His teacher wanted him to stop taking reading books home for the next 3-4 weeks, to give him a break, but I feel it's better if he takes at least one bok home each week so he doesn't forget what he already knows. I also hope that I will be able to trick, threaten and bribe him into reading a tiny bit. Better a page here and a sentence there than nothing at all, I think.

So, today I started out very optimistically by asking him if he would read to me. He made a face and told me 'No!'. I begged. He still refused. I offered him cake. He refused. I told him there would be no more video games or computers or tv until he read those 8 pages. He refused. I asked him why he didn't want to read. He said he hated reading because it was 'SO boring'. 'Is it boring because it takes such a long time to figure out what the words mean?', I asked. 'Yes.' Then I told him that the more he reads the easier it will become. He didn't seem convinced.



After breakfast I didn't really have time to bother with Ben's reading as I had my own reading to do, preparing for a pedagogy seminar (I'm working on my teaching qualification) tomorrow. Ole (aka Dad) sat down with Nic to help him with the rest of his homework. Ben ran around the living room bugging us, whining about being bored when I had an idea. I took him into the kitchen and found some of the fridge poetry words. We have some ready made ones, and a few I made myself with vocabulary from the ORT books on to help Ben recognise the most common words. I picked out some of the names and words he should know and made him try to read a simple sentence. I am Floppy. I could never find enough words to make a proper story so I ended up making a story about Floppy going to the park, having Ben read the odd word in between that I was able to find on the fridge. He really enjoyed that and made me repeat the story twice, helping me read the words.

I figured I might be able to take this one step further and took five of the word magnets back to the dining table where the others sat with Nic's school work. I wrote the story on a sheet of paper, except for the words on the magnets and put them in the appropriate places. Then we read the story together. Afterwards I asked him if he would like to write the words from the magnet on the paper, completing the sentences. He was very happy to try that, and did so in no time, working very diligently. Finally we read the story again and we were all very proud of his efforts, but none more than the author himself. And just like that Ben had spent the morning reading and writing!