My Reading Buddy's name is Atticus and is 6 years old. He has two brothers and loves to play sports. He is a very smart kid and loves to read. He has two geckos and discusses how he likes to feed them live grasshoppers. A session that went very well with Atticus was last Wednesday, the 27th of February, when we began to write our story. Atticus came up with an elaborate story because he has such a big imagination, about a porcupine inventor who invented machines to capture the bad guys who stole his food. It was really fun to brainstorm with Atticus and write down this magic adventure that Pokey the porcupine goes on. He also had a good time beginning to draw the illustrations for the story!
A connection between the course material and experiences with my student is how Atticus does not know how to read complicated words such as "awesome" or "Sonja" because of the silent letters within the words. This is similar to how a foreigner may not know how to read those words either because they have differing grammar and phonetics. Although Atticus is having trouble pronouncing some difficult words, he has improved on his reading. At the beginning of the semester he barely wanted to read, but now he jumps in on almost every book and can read through the pages efficiently. Atticus and I have really been focusing on reading mostly through the semester, but before we pick out books we write our names on name tags and draw elaborate pictures around our names that tell stories in themselves. The other day, each letter in our names had eyes and a smiley face! A few weeks ago, me and Atticus were reading a book and the sentence "The dad was more prone to letting Jimmy play if he took out the trash," came up. Atticus asked what prone meant and I described its definition, now Atticus knows "prone" along with many other words, so I think he is gaining knowledge every week.
This experience has showed me that sentences and words that I think are simple may be extremely difficult for those who have not learned them yet. I've learned to be less ethnocentric, and put myself in a 6 year old's shoes, reading the book from his perspective. I've learned to not take my knowledge of the English language for granted and challenged myself to learn more difficult words.
