J girl got her progress report from school yesterday. I'm happy to report she got "4"s in all subject areas. "3" is satisfactory and "4" is mastered. I'm not too concerned about grades at this level but it's nice she did well at school. J girl has also been consistently reading for about 30-45min. a day by herself. Currently, she's reading "Charlotte's web" by E.B. White.
Previously, she read "The Little House in the Big Woods" with me. It was pretty much she read a page and I read a page. That was a difficult book and for reading that book and taking an AR (accelerated reader) quiz at her school, she would get 5 points for passing the AR quiz. Considering any picture book is worth about 0.5 points and some of the Junie B books are 1.0 or 1.5 points. You can imagine the level of difficulty of a 5 points book. Anyway, she scored 100% on the AR quiz for that book. The AR program in her school is set up such that for getting 5 points in a marking period, they would get invited to the AR reader party. Considering most books at 1st grade level are 0.5points, they would need to read 10 books and take 10 AR quizzes and pass in order to go to the AR party where they watch a movie, have popcorn and drink after school.
One thing I'm trying to work with J girl is summarizing. I came to the realization that in order for J girl to summarize well, she had to have understood the story well. And I'm not 100% sure how to help her. I know one thing her teacher mentioned at PT conference is to let her tell us the beginning, middle, and end of the story. For example, we watched the movie "BOLT" and when J girl was summarizing, you can clearly tell she did not understand the gist of the whole movie. She did not understand that because BOLT was on a movie set for most of his life, he believed wholeheartedly that it was his duty to use his super powers to protect Penny and to fight the "green-eyed" monster. She told us the beginning, middle, end parts but they did not connect.
When J girl first started 1st grade, her idea of a summary would be pretty much tell you the whole story. In places where the story really caught her attention, she would attempt to tell you all the details. Then we moved on to try shortening the story and getting rid of some of the details, and that was better. The problem with that was she was not always sure what to cut out. So sometimes, the key parts got axed out and the story ended up not making sense in some parts. Anyway, its been a work in progress.
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