I had a chance to look over the blue homework pages. There are a few questions that I’d like to answer for everyone so I can clear up any confusion.

1. Q. Do I turn in the practice pages from the packet? A. No. Just check the box that applies to which practice work your child did during that week.

2. Q. There are a lot of things on this list. How do I get these for them to practice? A. At this point I have only introduced Baggie Books, K packet, IXL math and Raz Kids. The other work will be coming along, but it might not show up every single week. So for now just do what you are familiar with, and I will post when something new is available.

3. Q. Does Raz-Kids count towards reading minutes? A. Absolutely! Any reading counts. That includes if they read to you or you read to them.

4. Q. Do weekends count for reading minutes? Any number of minutes read from Friday to Friday counts. I can’t require reading on weekends or holidays, so shorter weeks can have smaller numbers. But if you are reading 20 minutes each day on a normal week, you should have 100 minutes per week for reading.

5. Q. How many stories should we do in one day for Raz-Kids? A. Raz-Kids is a leveled reading program. In order for me to put kids on a level that fits them, I need to test them individually with each level. The new state test took my time for that, so now I have to figure out how to test them while I’m teaching. Hmmm. I will get them leveled as soon as I can. If they have read all the books on A and are completely bored, the system will automatically let them move to B books. These are much more enjoyable, but don’t beyond B now until I get them leveled. I want them to be comfortable with the level I have them reading. But that being said, I want them READING! So try to give them Raz-Kids each day…one or two books and then use other reading sources to fill that raging desire!

6. Q. My child is guessing words based on pictures. A. That isn’t really a question but I want to address this. I actually TEACH them to look at the pictures to help them figure out words. That is a context clue concept and it is critical to reading and comprehension. However, it should be more than a guess. We look at the first letter(s), surrounding words and pictures to help us learn words that we don’t know and those we have not yet learned the phonics skill to figure out. We don’t want to hold them back from reading while we learn all the phonics rules. If it is a phonetic word (one that can be sounded out easily like t-i-p) then by all means make them work for it. But Ostrich might be a little intimidating. 🙂 Feel free to give them the words that they don’t know, but are repeating, because they learn also by repetition.