oops!

So I don't know if I blogged about this, but Logan was moved out of his tier 2 group and into tier 1. If you don't remember, basically it means he no longer has to leave the classroom for extra help with his reading. Tier 1 is the "yellow" group. When he was leaving the classroom for the extra help, their were 3 other children that went with him, and he was the only one to get moved up. The other 3 still go to Mrs. Arnolds plus another student who was in Tier 1, but still isn't quite getting it, so she was moved to Tier 2. I'm not saying this to brag or anything, I am just saying it because at first I thought it would be a group thing, sort of like if one was still struggling they would all stay until they could all move on. Apparently, that isn't the case and I am very happy that it is based on the individual child's needs and not a group. I am really proud of Logan for working hard. His first day in Tier 1 was last Monday, and so far he is doing well. I know this is going to sound terrible, but after I got the note telling me he was moving to tier 1, my first thought was YAY! My next thought was, "so, how long until he gets to the green level?" When I told my mom, she was like...omg! you should be happy for him! I am happy for him, I just want him to continue to work hard and succeed. The hard part is that Logan misses Mrs. Arnold:(

I have tried to really encourage his reading by always putting aside what I am doing ANY time he wants to read. This isn't as easy as it sounds because reading with Logan can be incredibly frustrating. I KNOW how to read, but I DON'T know how to teach someone to read. I can show him how to sound out words, but I can't make him string the letters together to form a word. It seems so easy, but that's because I already know how to do it - trying to explain why a y sounds like an "i" in the word "why" and why the "h" is silent...I don't know how to do that...it is what it is. This last week, his book from school had words like, "people", "some", "they", "where", "are", "thing", and "little". He got "people", "little" and "some" easily, the others took some time. Thing is the only word he still has some trouble with. Other words in the book were train, truck, bicycle, fire engine, plane, crane, bulldozer...but the picture was there to kind of help him work it out. I decided to take every word in each of his books and write them out into flash cards. My hope was that he would be able to recognize the words, not just from his book but in other places. I think it worked. He has 36 word flash cards and the only one he has real issues with is "bicycle". He will get two new books today, so I will do the same thing and keep going over all the words. I am goind to try to make a bingo game or something to help make it a little fun. Also, I had an idea to make a memory game where he has to find a pair of words one that is all capital letters and one that's lowercase...for ex. WHERE and where would be one pair. Anyway, he is really picking it up pretty quickly, I will be so excited when we can read a book together and I wont walk away with a massive headache!!! LOL