Word Families - the return

I had anticipated having Mike join me on Monday night, but not Sam. So I was more than a little pushed out of my stride by having an extra child to try and figure out. Consequently I didn't do as much with the twins as I would have liked.

I had prepared a set of word family endings typed and printed from my home computer. I had cut them into small rectangles and mixed them all up in a bag. The families were all the two letter -a ones and all the two letter -i ones.

The first thing I set the twins to was sitting down with the bag of each set and sorting them out for for me. They didn't get it at first, and M was especially tired and not keen at all, but they slowly did a fair bit of the work. I immediately saw that I had given them too complicated a task, but by then I was trying to listen to Sam reading, and I left them to their devices as long as I could.

After a time, T had finished sorting all the -i endings, so I asked her to put them in ABC order by pile. It took a long while to be able to explain this so that she understood, but she finally did and seemed to manage it. After a few minutes of telling me that she didn't want to do it.

M struggled for a long while with the -a endings. In hindsight, as I said, I gave her too big a task. On tuesday I thinned out the piles so that the next time I could have each child work with two endings.

After Sam read Hop on Pop, with much interruption from the girls - I had him work on the -i endings, while T read to me. She couldn't settle on a book and we read parts of Froggy Bakes a Cake and two others that I now can't remember. It was really difficult to concentrate my help with all three kids.

When M stopped organising her word endings - she really didn't get it - I had her pull out some homework and we started her on that.

With ten minutes to the end of the girls' night, I sent Sam upstairs to work with Clyde for a few minutes. Mike came down to sit with me, and then the girls packed up and went home to finish homework and fall into bed. It's a long night for them.

After a couple of easy starts, Mike read the first two chapters of The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse, a Chet Gecko mystery. He seems able to read, but is only reading the words, not the story. I suggested to him that we just work our way through the whole series. Because by the end of this book he'll have a handle on the characters and won't have to learn them again in starting a different book. He seemed okay with that, although he queried that I meant we read the whole book that night.