What a wonderful message to receive from 8 year-old Corin’s mum. Corin is about a month away from finishing the main part of the course:
“Just thought I’d give you a bit of an update…
Easyread is ticking along nicely, I would say. Corin is still enjoying it [at lesson 194!] – it’s just become part of daily life, really. His reading is still improving. He’s reading Ungar at the moment and I’m pleased that he’s still engaged with the story, despite it being the longest he’s read so far. He loves the reading statistics (he loves his maths 🙂 and working out how many pages make how many percent etc. I think at this stage it’s nice to see that his reading speed is improving as well as his accuracy.
Last week, they did a reading test in class (not SATs as he’s in year 3, just an internal assessment, but with standardised tests). As he was off school, but feeling reasonably well, we did it at home. After a bit of a wobbly start (Corin took about 30 mins to complete one of three sections and got very worried that he was taking too long – we took a time out to talk about “test tactics” and when he went back to it, he really concentrated on the rest of the test. After 1 hour he had done two sections and only needed another 20 mins for the remainder. And this was a Year 3 test! I’ve only flicked through his answers, so I don’t know his final score, but what I saw looked good, so I think he will score reasonably high. And most important of all, in the end, he felt quite proud that he’d managed to get through it. It was more about the unfamiliarity of the testing method that was hard for him, rather than the reading and questions themselves. The fact that he worked through a Year 3 test and in the end felt he did alright really gave him a boost.
Spelling is improving – I think – very very slowly. I think Spell Drive is really good and I have a feeling it is very slowly seeping into writing outside of Easyread. I was quite surprised that in the last Writing Lab, Corin spelled every word correctly.
In other news, after having finished the Harry Potter series (read by Dad), Corin has now started reading the first book on his own. He loves the story and I think, because he knows the story, he has the feeling that he can manage the reading, too. His added incentive is that his dad has started reading the German version – and he’s much slower than Corin 🙂
Sorry, waffling a bit now… I just wanted to add a bit of context to what can be seen on the stats in Easyread…”
We love to receive these kinds of messages, particularly the “waffle” of all the great stuff that’s happening for our secret agents. Well done Corin!