My son is ten. He's not a "young ten" but a boy with a birthday right in the third week of October. I brought him home from public school at the end of Grade One. He was 8. An old 8. He couldn't read. I had no idea what he could do in math, nor what he should be doing, so we started over with the math books--in Grade One.
That was two and 1/2 years ago. I have had to "remediate" him for so long, I have forgotten to set high standards for him. But, I got a nice slap up the side of my head about that today.
Up until now, I have been taking down all his narrations for his writing. Only a few weeks ago did I start the next step (which is supposed to happen at the end of Grade 2): dictating the first sentence back to him to write before I hand him his paper to copy out. Yesterday, he asked me to dictate back the first two sentences. I did...and he proceeded to finish it on his own--without looking at what I'd taken down. "Yes! We've made it to third grade!" I thought.
Today I set him down to do the third re-telling in Aesop A--the Crow and the Pitcher. I let him read it over once (we last looked at it two days ago) and then handed him a piece of paper, a pencil and an eraser and said "tell the story."
He had a few moments where he just HAD to know how to spell the odd word here and there...and I just gave him the dictionary. (Heartless Mom! OK, I admit I looked up "higher" for him and had him copy it from the page.) But much to my surprise, he did the whole thing without me. We'll edit it tomorrow.
Perhaps I have been holding his hand too long! And I think I'll start treating him as a fourth grader from hereon.
The ramifications are huge, people, huge. For one thing, I can stop fretting about his being "behind." For another, he's entering that "independent" stage so I can breathe once in a while. And you can bet that I'm going to let him do his entire narration all on his own next time. Maybe we'll even start (gasp) outlining!
He is becoming mature. S-l-o-w-l-y, to be sure, but I felt the fresh wind of change today and I'm so grateful. I had to share.
3 comments:
Congratulations! To him and to you. It is so great when they reach another milestone, isn't it. Hard work is paying off! :0)
Wonderful! That will feel so good to him, as well as to you.
An unrelated comment -- unrelated to this, anyway -- I just saw your cool map that tracks where your blog readers are located, and sat and stared at my little green star blinking and blinking. That's cool.
One person's reading from Greece or somewhere in that vicinity???
Post a Comment