Hi Adeline!
Yep, you're right. We are not in Sg at the moment. We live in Germany where most kids are used to rough play and manners of that kind that I described are indeed rare.
But the boy I mentioned has a pretty special parentage. His dad is American, while his mom is Latin American.
How I wish my B would be a fluent reader too. I think the sheer amount of words seem to deter him to pick up reading on his own, although I'm quite certain that he's capable of sounding out the words on his own.
Last year, I did a 5 day work on a simple reader with him. It turned out that he was reading at an astonishing speed, by day 5 he was reading almost 80% of the book on his own. Unfortunately we did not move on very much from there since there were complaints from his teacher that he was getting restless once he completed his work in class. To his teacher, he's already way too much in advance - as we all know what the American system is about, whereas I would consider my son a baby reader, esp with the situation back home.
Anyhow, I was reviewing what we haven't done for ages. You see... I stopped reading to both my kids since the end of summer coz I felt totally burnt out. And the complaints from the teacher were a convenient excuse for me to take a break altogether. His daddy took over for a couple of weeks. And then, there was not much reading done except for the weekly couple of library books. Ok... long digression there.
So we did the Fat Cat Sat on the Mat again. I was pleasantly shocked that he was reading the whole book to me! In fact, my interest was rekindled one night when he picked up the book and he read it to his sister. But he too is an impatient person. So he stopped after a couple of pages with a long sigh of exasperation, as if there were too many pages for him to read.
So as surely as the heated discussion on reading now, we're going to stick to our daily reading routine for a while.
Hi Serena!
I always thought that using the finger to point would slow down the reading speed. But some people claim that even people who speed read point at a spot in a book to help their eyes concentrate so that they won't skip lines.
Anyway, for me it's a conscious effort as I tend to read pretty quickly. I pulled a trick on my son before:
I told him my hands were getting tired from all the pointing when he's reading, so now it's his turn to point and I read. It works! Now we take turns to hold the book and point while the other person reads, 4 pages each.
Hi ky!
Maybe I should go try yr gynae. The queue at Peter Chew's is always so looooooooooong!
