LEARNING TO READ

I am a fanatic about reading.  I love to read.  I always have.  When I was young, my mother had to insist that I put a book down and go outside or I would have stayed on the couch reading whenever I had spare time.  I got in trouble at school for reading.  I would open my textbook and hide the book I was reading inside of it and read in class.  When I got in trouble once at home, I told my mother if she really wanted to punish me, she shouldn't let me read anything for one week.  I love to read.  I don't get much of a chance to read anymore.  I usually stick to children's books or young adults because I can finish them quickly.  If I read a longer book, I usually have forgotten the beginning of it by the time I get to the end, if it takes me more than a few days to read.

One of the first questions I ask parents of children with PWS who are in school is "Can your child read?"  Most everyone I ask says yes.  Audrianna is in the 4th grade, special education, and can only read her name and she recognizes the word Apple in an Applebee's sign.  For Christmas I bought her 12 Weekly Reader books with CDs and for her birthday, on Jan. 25th, she is getting 3 different reading systems, thanks to the generosity of a facebook friend of mine.

Right now she is listening to the Weekly Reader CDs and looking at the books.  She is a little more concerned about keeping up with turning the pages but she is getting the hang of it.  She is now listening to/looking at Curious George.

For those who don't know me from Facebook, Audrianna got a new teacher right before Christmas.  Before that I had been considering homeschooling her because of all the difficulties with the old teacher.  The new teacher is a dream-come-true and she is working on teaching Audrianna to read.  It seems like the only thing the last teacher had been teaching was the days of the week and the months for the last 1-1/2 years.  Audrianna requested that the teacher send flashcards home and she did, but apparently I don't know the right way to do the flashcards (according to Audrianna I have to have a piece of paper and draw lines through something).  I must make a note to ask the teacher about this.

I also got some good ideas from another facebook friend of mine about cutting out words and putting them with pictures of what they are.  That reminded me of the movie The Color Purple when Celie's sister put flashcards on everything in the house, etc., when she was teaching Celie to read.  Why didn't I think of that?  You will be seeing flash cards all over my house in the next week or so.

Well Curious George is over and I have to put in another CD, the third one so far.  She is really enjoying this. So am I.  A few moments of no questions asked.  Wonderful.


Janis