Good Reads

We've been hitting read-alouds pretty heavy these last few weeks, as I mentioned awhile back. We are currently on our second Doctor Doolittle book: Doctor Doolittle's Post Office. The version we are reading has nearly 400 pages, but fortunately many of them are pictures, so we are still able to get through it at a fairly good clip.

Kwamai gets absorbed in the story. Felicity, of course, is less able to track and pay attention, especially when I read seven chapters at a sitting! But she is generally patient, or goes off to do her own thing while I read to Kwam.

I happened to note that The Great Turkey Walk that we finished a few weeks ago is considered at a 4th-7th grade reading level. I'm not sure that reading level and being-read-to-level are the same, because certainly children can comprehend more than they can fill their own minds with. When we began Post Office I would ask Kwamai some questions to see if he comprehended, and even though he struggles with coming up with the right words for his thoughts, he was able to convey that he was tracking with me and usually understood the flow of the story. (I actually started doing this because we were experimenting with whether he was actually able to listen and play a computer game at the same time. We discovered that was a no-go.)

Complete aside: today he asked me "What is a Marine Dolphin?" Turns out what he really wanted to ask was what is a Navy SEAL. Close.