School vacation is here! Also, new books.

It's school vacation week, so there will be no homework. Yesterday we had a family day trip to an aquarium and a children's museum. Monday, my kids will have a play date with some other kids. But hopefully the rest of this week, I can get in some of my own teaching.

If schedules permit, I may also have my daughter's reading level tested by a phonics based reading teacher in our area and see if she can help determine what areas I should consider focusing on with my daughter to improve her spelling and reading. Although the school tested my daughter and found her to be above grade level (I'm not sure how far above), I want to make sure, with all the gaps I've discovered thus far in her education, that my daughter continues to develop appropriately in her reading. After all, studies show that the years before the end of 3rd grade are crucial for a child's ability to read their textbooks through the rest of his/her schooling.

New books - In my quest to find some helpful resources for my children for spelling, I have discovered an excellent set of books that can also be helpful with the teaching of reading. They are appropriately named "How to Spell" and are written by Laura Toby Rudginsky and Elizabeth C. Haskell. I'm not sure if these are still in print as I had to purchased as used.

There is teaching handbook and 4 workbooks. I have worked through most of the 1st book with my daughter. Although, most of that is review for my daughter, there were some very helpful sections. Generally speaking, the books seem to set out general rules with examples of the exceptions.

The second book has a review sheet of various phonics combinations with sample words, which can serve as a nice review. The second book also has instruction on how to break words into syllables to make them easier to read, Some of this book is still review for my daughter, but it has no many additional tips that are useful, and there is nothing wrong with a little review to enforce learning.

I had been using phonics books from Spectrum, which I still believe are extremely useful. But I think these books will make a good compliment for us.

As for my son, I am slowly working with him on his phonics. We have been reviewing the consonant blends and many of the vowel combinations. I will be using these new workbooks with him too. He has enough phonics to read some of the early readers with some help from me with the more complicated words, and he finds these much more interesting than the books they send home from school, which I still do read with him on using phonics. I'll try to squeeze in some letter writing practice with him too. But I do have to be careful because he's not as interested in sitting down and doing these things for a long period of time and I don't want to overwork it and lose him. I may have to resort to some bribery...oh, look at those cookies that we can have after we're done. (laughs)

Should a second grader be able to sound out the word delicatessen?

We were in the grocery store last night and as we passed the deli, my daughter stopped me and said, I am going to sound that word out. She really didn't get any father than del- before she started adding letters that were not there. We've worked so hard at sounding out and she knows all the sounds and many, many of the rules- why is it still so hard at times. The word delicatessen can be figured out if you just break it up and don't just start guessing. At times its so frustrating, and I wonder if as she grows older it will come together better? I also thought it was just the big words that she might not know the meaning to, but every so often, something like "cold" trips her up. One night she read cold as clod. And, I know she's not dyslexic.

Am, I expecting too much? She's reading well above grade level - but I'm not sure how much of it is that she's memorized a huge vocabulary of words, or that she is using her phonics. Should I just relax about it and just keep on what we're doing and hope it just naturally works out?

I'm thinking of having a retired reading teacher (who teaches phonics) to do an evaluation. Maybe she can either point to some things that are missing that we can work on or help me put this all into perspective.

I don't want to be too hard on her. But I don't want her to have problems when she's later reading textbooks (science, social studies, etc.). When she's reading about cold blooded animals, I don't want her thinking they are clods.