My wife and I went to my son's school for a parent-teacher conference. He's in kindergarten so this is a new experience for us. As we drove up to the school, we were wondering just what the teacher could tell us about our son that we didn't already know.
As it turns out she didn't tell us anything we didn't know and I guess that was good. Yeh, he's "floppy", yeh, he likes to hum the theme song to Superman: The Motion Picture, and yeh, he likes to draw even when the class is moving onto stuffing pine cones with peanut butter. But we knew this.
I was pretty amused when she showed us an evaluation she did on his reading skills. She held up the alphabet on two sheets. The first sheet had all of the capital letters and the second sheet had all of the lower-case letters. She didn't seem surprised that he could identify all of them. However, she was surprised that he knew the sound that each letter made. I bet she would be very surprised if she actually asked him to read something and he actually read it.
The way they teach reading in kindergarten is fundamentally flawed, in my humble opinion. In his class, they have "words" all over the place, usually accompanied by pictures. Students are taught to look at the picture, say the word, and then look at the whole word. Unfortunately, they are not given any skills to actually read the word... in a vacuum. When the picture is gone, they're basically lost.
About a year ago I started him on these really good beginner reading books called Bob Books First! He made some slow, painful progress through them and I eventually stopped because he was giving me so much trouble. Then, about three weeks ago a friend at work recommended a book called Phonics Pathways.
Listen to this.
After three weeks of going through 1-2 pages a night of Phonics Pathways, I thought he was ready to read the Bob books again. I selected the the first book of the last set of three. The Bob books are divided into three colors. Red (to be read first), Green (to be read second), and Yellow (to be read last... before you move onto the next series). My son read through it with almost no effort.
By the time his Kindergarten teacher "officially" evaluates his vowel pronunciation she should be in for a bit of a surprise. I can only hope.
After the conference, my wife and I went out to nice Japenese restaurant and relaxed to a nice dinner of assorted sushi, shrimp Gyoza, and a very fresh Sapporo beer.
When I got home I was hoping to work on a bunch of technology and did almost nothing. I caught up on my RSS feeds. Bloglines rocks for that. All the while catching up on Podcasts that built up over the weekend.
I just got through listening to some of the Bloggercon coverage and the Podcasting session led by Adam Curry was a good listen.
The one thing I did do involved Virtual PC. You may have read my earlier post on the subject. I wanted to install Suse on my home machine but my installation kept failing. Dangit. So, I installed it on a virtual PC at work and it installed and ran fine. I even got Mono running on it and I wrote, compiled, and executed (via mint!) my first Mono Hello, World program.
I then copied the VPC to my iPod, which was about a 2GB file, copied it to my h ome machine, double-clicked on the VPC and within seconds I was in the middle of my Suse session... the output from my Hello, World program still on the screen.
Now that fucking rocks.
Posted by Nick Codignotto at November 9, 2004 11:30 PM | TrackBack