Adventures in Reading, Continued

I’ve talked before about the challenges of getting my son to want to read.

His reading has gotten better, actually, but now I’m more focused on his spelling. I figured if he’s making a strong connection between the sounds the different combination of letters make, both his reading and spelling will improve.

My wife has this wonderful exercise of writing sentences back and forth with him on a piece of paper. After each sentence is written, she would have him read it out loud and gently make corrections.

I did my own version of that activity. When I wrote my sentences, I chose topics I knew my son would enjoy while keeping the word choice and sentence structure challenging for him, personally. Those two decisions seemed to keep his interest level high.

Finally, I added one twist: I purposely misspelled 1-2 words in the sentence I wrote and encouraged him to correct me. That not only made the activity more fun for him, but I found it easier to give him feedback when he needed it.

We ended up doing about 20 minutes of these back-and-forth sentences and talking about them, which was 20 minutes more than he was willing to do when we started. Worked out great.