flea

Casper is finally getting good enough at reading simple books that she can get through several sentences at a time. I've been reading with her several nights in a now, mostly practice examples for the upcoming standardized tests, and it's sort of fascinating to see her process. Sometimes she coasts along for three sentences including some harder words I wouldn't expect her to be able to sight-read, and then gets stuck on "then," which is a word that she's supposedly been able to sight-read since kindergarten. When she sounds a word out, sometimes she sounds it out fully, getting all the sounds right, but still has trouble making it into an actual word. But other times she begins to sound it out, maybe even getting some of the sounds wrong, and then it clicks as a word. She has special trouble mixing up of, for, and from. She never seems to remember that "ea" is often pronounced "ee," no matter how many times I remind her about Danny Rebus (who is annoyed by this homonymy on Electric Company). Sometimes it seems like she gets *tired* after a few sentences, and starts to stumble through things I know she can do. I feel like if we keep up reading like this every night, she might develop more stamina! It's like a muscle, right?

I should note that she breezes through the comprehension questions after the little stories. They are, in fact, so easy that one often needn't even have read the story to answer them accurately, even if one is only 6. I have no fear for her abilities on the CRCT, though her ability to focus for a long enough period may be a problem, especially if they turn the pages slowly. It's hard when it's hard (on one level, because she can't read well yet) but also boring (because the content is too simple).