When your child reads above grade level...

Since Babalu learned to read in Kindergarten (at 4!!) he has been an amazing reader for his age (and gender, little boys tend to read later than little girls). Right now he can read 5/6 grade books but he can't really do a language arts program geared towards those grades. This has been a huge challenge for me in terms of finding a good program. At the moment we are working through Sonlight's 4th grade LA curriculum and he is enjoying most of the books and being challenged by the worksheets (Sonlight has excellent books but the actual curriculum isn't a good fit for us). It gets frustrating. For next year my plan is this-

• To use a LA program geared toward his grade level/age (in this case, redoing 4th grade)
• A good portion of his English grade will be independently reading books at his level of ability with book reports. 
• These independant books will come from a pre made list that Big Daddy and I come up with. He will have to choose one at a time. We will take his tastes into account when we choose these books and the list will have more books than we intend for him to read so that he has a lot of options. 

Hopefully he enjoys this. I may actually start this sooner than August, perhaps in a couple of weeks. 

I suck at ending posts.

The End. 

Weekly Highlight {Week 6}

We were running late with our spelling this week so I didn't give Babalu his spelling pretest until Tuesday. He scored a 33%. He had never done that poorly on a pretest before so I wasn't sure he would do well on his test today. I've never been so happy to be wrong! Between the practice worksheets and oral quizzes he learned them so well that he spelled them ALL correct today. He has never earned a 100% on a spelling test before (always an 80%) so we are all very proud of him.

Update on testing

I gave Babalu that darn math test and it didn't go so well. Many problems were worded differently than he had ever encountered and since I couldn't say "you know, it's when you do ____" he would not know exactly what to do. He had also never (not EVER) taken a math test. This year we will work more on passing standardized tests (Spectrum has a book for each grade level). I never bothered to test english because I know he can read above grade level and I'm sure it will just be a repeat of the math test so we will just work on it and take the 3rd grade test in the spring.

Testing

Have I mentioned that Nonni is a teacher? Well, she is. In the 12 years I have known her she has taught 1-5 grade and maybe even Kindergarten, I can't remember exactly. In the last few months she has been nagging  encouraging me to give Babalu the STAR tests (the standardized tests for California, the state we live in). She gave me links to both the english and math portions. Today I am printing them out and over the next couple of days he will be taking them. I'm sure, after looking them over, that Babalu will do fine but I am still interested to see how he does. I shall report his results at the end of the week.


And now a totally unrelated cat funny:

{Throwback Thursday} Babalu

 Baby Babalu with his binky. The only one of the three boys to use a binky past the first few weeks. He stopped using it on his own at about 8 months old. Was so thankful to not have a Binky Battle when he reached his first birthday. He was such a sweet baby, pudgy and soft. Thankfully he is still that way, aside from the pudgy part- he is rather trim now.

{Wordless Wednesday}