Last week CootieGirl began her seven weeks of tutoring at a local university. Some of you may recall that at the beginning of her school year, she took a reading aptitude test and scored very low. She should have been reading at a second grade level, but according to the test she was barely reading at a first grade level. *sigh* Her teacher assured me that CG was keeping up with class fine, that the test score was misleading because CG had to step away for a couple minutes and it was a timed test, and that she’d following CG’s progress more closely. In the meantime, I found out that a local university was offering reading help via their elementary education majors. I quickly signed up CG for the program, which started last week.
I was not able to go in with her for the first session, but her personal tutors were two cute college co-eds who obviously loved kids and were excited about the tutoring project, so I wasn’t worried. They were the very definition of bubbly, fun, elementary school teachers. When the hour was up, CG came out and told me that she hadn’t done much, but that she had fun. Basically, the tutors had each read her a story, and then quizzed her to see how much of the story she could retain in her memory. And then based on what she could remember, she drew a picture that showed the main theme from the story. Her second session is tomorrow, and she’s excited about it.
In the meantime, she was recently given another aptitude test at school and she is now in the 2nd grade level, testing at 2.2 (up from 1.6 two months ago). I’m very happy about this. I’ve noticed over the past several weeks that her reading has gotten much better, and that for the most part she’s not fighting the fact that she has to read (whereas before we would have BATTLES when trying to get her to read). She was very excited about her new aptitude test result.
All in all, I still don’t think she’ll ever be an avid reader like me, or even her brother, but if I can get her to just NOT HATE IT, that’ll be fine with me.