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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3134 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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As someone who has a fake going on the computer job and a degree, I've gotten roped in to tutoring/babysitting a psuedo family members kids. They go to one of those classical academy style charter schools everybody is excited about and got dANG: These 3rd - 5th graders don't know how to fucking read.

They are learning through something like systematic phonics (probably), where you learn letter and syllable sounds first; resulting in two kids who REALLY slowly scan through a sentence like human recursive descent parsers and one brighter middle schooler who totally ignored the teachers and taught himself how to read on his own by simply picking up a book and plowing through it.

Interestingly, one of the two kids in elementary is doing pretty good in math, so I gotta assume that the IQ is there. Little dude might be a little dyslexic, who knows?

Apropos: Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own? What are the kids reading these days? I'm gonna see if I can't find them a bigass children's science encyclopedia, that was my jam as a little babu but I welcome any suggestions from ya'll.

Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own?

What level are they at?

Comic strip collections (my kids liked Baby Blues most, IIRC) let young readers who aren't 100% solid manage to grasp more context from the drawings.

Children's science encyclopedias are great; if the kids have some obsession (space, dinosaurs, animals, whatever) then get one focused on just that to start with.

At a higher level, Harry Potter is a classic for this. My eldest went from "slowly moving through 100 page books together because that's what mommy or daddy were pushing" to "finishing 500 page tomes by herself because nightly reading time with daddy wasn't long enough or frequent enough" astonishingly fast.

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