Education Friday - Proximity and Variety

Happy Summer!

School's out and the kids are home.
Which means brief entries or none
at all.
Two thoughts for summer reading -
Proximity
With my both my boys, I've
had some luck with product placement.
I put a book (instructive or appealing,
or with luck, both) next to them or
in a place where they are going to 
be soon. In some cases, in the car,
I reach it back to them.
Here's the hard part - I say nothing.
They either read it or they don't.
The decision is theirs.
This sometimes works.
When I was a child, my Father insistence that
I read Kim kept me away from it from months.
When he shut up about it, I sought it out and
read it and decided I loved Rudyard Kipling 
books.
Variety
My oldest son (the one with autism)
has to read The Hound of the Baskervilles
this Summer. He has challenges with
his working memory and
comprehension. He can read
a book aloud and be unable to tell you
anything but the number of chapters 
and what page each started on. So 
I'm trying the multi-channel approach.
Before we started, we watched book
trailers for it on the computer.
We're listening to it, he's reading it,
and he's reading the graphic novel.
He's also working on it in Extended 
School Year. I'll let you know how 
he does with it.
A typically developing child would probably
be heartily sick of the book by now.
But he seems no more reluctant than
usual to read it.

Summer Reading 2 - The Outsiders

Back again after a summer break - Nashville's insane school schedule means my son handed in his book reports Monday. Unlike his typically developing peers, he spent almost every day during his short summer laboring to read these books.
Then came the painful process of sitting down with him and trying to cue him in to remember some of what he read and prompt him on what he might write in response.
(btw Pardon the blah look of this post, I'll try to add a photo later, and quotes from his reports. For now, bare bones to get me back into writing myself)
His second book of the summer was The Outsiders.
I know very little about his relationship to this one, except that
it took the entire month of July for him to read the book, with
the patient help of his dad.
The Outsiders is about the greasers and the socs, and a neighbor
of ours remembered that divide and described it vividly to my
son. I don't think he heard.
In the book, the tension between the two groups leads to violence
and death. The lead character, Ponyboy, survives to tell the tale.

Summer Reading - The Giver

Long time readers may have noted that I have not yet wailed over the choice of summer reading books that my son must read this Summer. There are several reasons for this:

1. There was no choice to make, just two books he needs to read.
2. The two books are good books.
3. When you're going into eighth grade, there are mighty few inappropriate subjects any more, sad or glad, you should be ready to read it.

Of course, my boy is not ready to read these books. The books are age appropriate, and he's lagging behind in several key areas. 

So we started with The Giver, the milder of the two books and one I thought he had some connection to through The Giver treehouse at Cheekwood. Plus I have read it before and there is a ton of information about it out there.

It has been hard going, and asking for help online brought up a new concept for me-working memory. Is my son's inability to remember what words mean due to a deficiency in this area? 
Or is it that he cannot visualize what he reads?

His lack of comprehension goes beyond his inability to understand words from their context. He was unable to recall what a hatchet was when he encountered the word "hatchet" in the text.
Very disturbing, since he read Hatchet for school and I thought he actually engaged with it rather strongly.

The Giver interests him little.
In case you don't know or can't recall, The Giver was the first really popular dystopian novel for young adults 
(if you're feeling bitter about Hunger Games, 
blame Lowry (or credit her if you're a Hunger fan))
Jonas is about to go through the ceremony of twelve in
his community and find out what his lifetime job assignment will be. Much to his alarm, he is given the previously unknown to him task of Receiver of Memory. The knowledge he receives from the
current receiver reveals to him how much of feeling and life 
has been kept from the people of the community in order to keep 
everyone calm and cooperative. As his memories and feelings 
deepen, he finds he can no longer accept the status quo. The 
revelation of what "release" really means drives him to action,
and he flees to freedom.
What happens to Jonas at the end of the book is ambiguous, and 
upset my husband. It did not upset my son who took the words
literally (no surprise there).

Summer Reading List

Last year I wrote about the mostly immensely depressing 
choices on the summer reading list for rising 5th graders 
(5/28) and my eventual choices for my son (6/5 & 6/14).
I don't know if I ever mentioned that our work together 
on laboriously getting through Dodger and Me (funny) 
and The Magician's Elephant (melancholy) was largely 
moot. My boy was in Reading Resource. 
Why isn't there a Reading Resource Summer Reading 
list? It might have more cheerful books.
He worked really hard all year, and made good progress.
So this Fall, the teachers are going to try to keep him in 
with his peers for reading. Which means we're back to the
Summer Reading List, this time for rising Sixth Graders.
At first glance, the list seems a bit less doom laden.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret has been suggested to me
for years as a possible read for him. I've avoided it because
the illustrations seem more distracting than helpful, but it's 
worth a try.

I had high hopes for Avi's Nothing But the Truth. It has 
journal entries and my son is currently obsessed with journals.
Unfortunately, the first journal entry date did not match up
with the copyright year and pleas that the author wrote the
book the previous year when March 13 was on a Tuesday
were to no avail.
The book has a miserably unhappy ending, but nobody dies.
Plus, it makes a case for literature, funding schools, 
supporting teachers, and paying attention to your kids. 
TO BE CONTINUED .   .   .
This week I want to plug a play-kids with autism read
the script and the lyrics, so it sort of fits the blog. 
If you're in Nashville Friday or Saturday, come see the 
kids of SENSE theatre perform Bridges.  Full details here:
http://www.sensetheatre.com/ 

What My Boy Thinks Summer Reading Will Be Like

Today was a half day of school, the last day of 
5th Grade for my ten year old. So the reading
limbo dance begins.
I asked my boy some questions about what he
thinks summer reading will be like.
Here's his response:
I like to read The little engine that could 

(Not the board book)

in the Summer because of the pictures. 

I like the engines.

I plan to read 

Do not open this Book. It’s very funny.

Mr. bond might come in one of the 

[library reading] programs. 

He is in for a shock.

The closest the summer reading

list comes to a picture book is

Hugo Cabret.

I don't know if Mr. Bond, the Science Guy

is on the library schedule or not.

And he has read Do Not Open This Book

five times so far this afternoon.

To Be Continued .  .  .

-Spectrum Mom

Summer Fun/Summer Skills

Summer offers a great chance 
for kids to read just because
they want to read.


But though my boy will flip
through books endlessly, we
need to sit down with him
to know if he's processing
anything.


A Couple of Boys was a 
great read aloud to do
together for his pre-K
brother, since my boy
does great with speech
bubbles. He sometimes
goes sing-song with 
longer passages.


"Read with feeling."
works great as an instruction
for him when a character
is speaking, and speech
bubbles make that
crystal clear - as clear
as pool water.



Now to find a few 
waterproof books .  .  .


- S M (Swim Mom)

Required Reading for a Miserable Summer

My rising fifth grader just received his summer 
reading list.


Three of the six books rate high on the "read this if
you really want to be depressed" scale.


I'll reserve judgement on the other three although "child 
separated from family" describes two of them and the third
starts with a friendless kid. 


Not a good list for a child struggling to 
comprehend relatively simple concepts 
like why a kid might be scared of thunderstorms.


The pretty image at the top comes from
a book about a girl whose mother
gets breast cancer so they'll probably
have to sell their home.



Bud, Not Buddy is about an orphan
who endures horrible abuse.



Among the Hidden describes
a dystopian future where the
protagonist's existence is illegal
because he's a third child
(should be balanced by a
dystopian future where everyone
has as many kids as they want
but there's no clean air or water .   .  .
but I digress).



The Music of the Dolphins
snatches a girl from her
family (so what if they're
dolphins?)


I'm sure these books are 
well written. But why are
we piling angst on 5th graders?





Sigh. If anyone has experience
with these books and can
suggest which might work
for a boy like my son
whose emotional
turmoil mostly comes
from the cup lid not
matching the cup or
having an unexpected
change in schedule, and
who wants everyone
to be happy and doesn't
understand why they're 
not,
please let me know!


-Spectrum Mom