Thursday Reading Groups

Today was my first morning volunteering with Katie's class. Every Tuesday - Friday morning a parent volunteer comes in to help with reading groups. I am on every other Thursday, since Will has preschool those days. There are 5 levels and each group has 4 kids in it.

I worked with Level 2 and Level 4 today, and I think it'll pretty much stay that way. I was a bit surprised by how vast the reading levels differ. Before we got to the books I went through some flash cards with the kids. All in Level 2 were having trouble with words like "in", "is", "we", "can", etc. And 2 had trouble just identifying the letters that the words started with. For example, I'd show them the word "DO" and they wounldn't be able to tell me what the first letter was. I am really excited to keep working with them because I just know we can make progress this year and they'll show a lot of improvement by springtime.

Then there were the kids in Level 4 - that's a whole other situation. They did some different flashcards and got totally bored with words like "look", "that", "this", "with", etc. Their book had 2 paragraphs on each page! The teacher and I talked about how difficult it is to find books for them that aren't too hard, yet aren't too easy. The key here will be keeping them interested in reading.

Katie was in the Level 4 reading group. She was a rockstar, and not too embarrassed that Mom was helping kids in her class. Her teacher said that next month she'll probably be ready for the accelerated reader program they have in 1st grade. (Whatever that means!)