Read any good books lately?

I vaguely recall sitting with my parents as a first grader, painstakingly working my way through a variety of early reader books so that I could stay in "the blue group" (We were the best readers) in Mrs. Mattson's reading class. And in case I ever forget how many hours my parents helped me, I only have to look back in my first scrapbook to see page after page of blue paper ribbons, covered with shiny star stickers, to know that they dedicated a lot of hours toward helping me learn to read.

And now it's my turn.

February is I love to read month, and so all of the kids in AJ's school are being encouraged to read with their families. Kindergarteners are supposed to read or be read to for at least 20 minutes every day. Normally we read a bedtime story each night, so we've expanded on that. We started over the weekend reading 2-3 books each evening. AJ reads one (with a LOT of help) and we read the others.

The challenge is, AJ is very particular about the books he reads. He has definitely labeled some of the books that would be easiest for him to read as "baby" or "boring" books. And so the challenge is to sit and try to figure out the best time to offer help when he needs help with just about every other word.

He gets frustrated at times, but that's far outweighed by his excitement when he reads an entire sentence by himself. His biggest problem is the variety of vowel sounds. He also often mixes up lowercase b and d, as well as M and W. It's tough to sound out words when you start off by making the wrong sounds.

The style of teaching has changed since I learned to read. While he works on sounding out words, he's also being taught "sight words". These are the little words like "the", "it" and "you". I guess I can see some benefit to this, because it helps with the pacing (which helps keep his enthusiasm going), plus I've noticed he's pretty quick to figure out just about any word that starts with "Th", so there must be some logic of how they expand on those sight words.

In the meantime, I just need to find a book for myself... on patience.