Introducing "Logan"

This dashingly handsome young man may look like Aseem, but he is actually Logan. Supriya, his Super-agent, gave him this personality. (Don't ask me where "Logan" came from!)

Drawing

Here's a gallery of our recent drawings:

Today Aseem, Supriya and I sat together and drew a dinosaur from the book "The Draw 50 Way" by Lee J. Ames. Aseem started drawing and got frustrated immediately. I told him that we are all learning to draw and it is frustrating in the beginning. I felt that I had to get involved. So we went thru the drawing line by line. I would draw one line, describe it a little (straight/ curved/ connecting this to that etc.) and Aseem & Supriya would copy it. It was fun and satisfying. I am going to offer a course like this next semester at our coop.

Last week Supriya started drawing circles with her new protractor and that inspired her to make them into faces. I thought it made a nice series, variations on a theme.

More on Aseem's Reading

My friend Betsy told me what her grandmother said to her about learning to read. Her grandmother was a reading specialist in the Ohio system, with a whole lot of experience teaching kids to read. She said, "Reading is 99% readiness and 1% exposure." If you push before a kid is ready to read, you and the kid are going to be frustrated. On the other hand, cnce they are ready, the 1% exposure is all it takes for them to start reading.

We are seeing the truth of this in action with Aseem. He recently started reading and now the process is accelerating as he assimilates his newly-learned skill. I am trying to do what I can to make him aware of patterns in words. So today I wrote: RED, BED, TED. He read them without a hitch. I followed up with:

AND, BAND, LAND
ZOO, ZOOM, ZOOT
LOO, LOOM, LOOT
TEN, TED, BED, BET

He read them all without a problem.

I have a chart of sight words (100 basic words that everybody needs to know to read at a basic level), and yesterday he took a shot at reading them. He knows many and he was able to sound out many more. It's so much fun to watch him learn these new skills with evident excitement and pride of ownership. I feel like I have the front seat for the greatest show on Earth!