I just have some reading-related things I wanted to share and a couple of questions, so I thought I would put them all together. First of all, our library recently got some new books that we've really enjoyed. It is a series -- "We Both Read." The parent (or older sibling if you wish) reads the longer portion on one page, and then the new reader reads the facing page, which has fewer (and easier) words. There are different levels depending on the ability of your reader.

Also, about 6 weeks ago, I had Elizabeth do this informal reading assessment:
http://highland.hitcho.com.au/readingassessment.pdf

She scored about a 1.25 reading level. Well, over the last month we've only done 8 lessons out of Reading Made Easy (which is rather slow as I'd prefer to do 3 lessons a week, but we've been slacking off). She's been doing a lot of reading aloud though, and we've been helping her with the words she does not know. Her reading skills have really seemed to blossom lately, and I was curious so I had her repeat the reading assessment today. I was pleasantly surprised that even though we've been kind of slacking off, she knew a lot more of the words and is now at a 1.95 reading level! She's gone through lesson 76 so far in RME.

Okay, in other reading news, Katie has been expressing an interest in learning to read for some time, so we decided to try RME with her and just go at a slower pace. Well, even though she really wants to learn to read, it just isn't clicking for her yet. I'm not that worried about it anyway due to her young age, but it's just that this is something she really seems to want. Well, I had a brainstorm. With Elizabeth, we went through the Explode the Code primers for preschool and she enjoyed them, so I bought ETC book 1. After looking at it though, the amount of writing was much more than the primers and she just doesn't particularly like writing or workbooks, so we decided to skip it since it just didn't seem to be a good fit for her. I decided to go ahead & keep it in case we wanted it some day for one of our other kids. We actually bought the primers for Katie to use also, but she's already working through the Rod & Staff preschool workbooks, and the ETC primers really just seemed like they would be busywork since she already knew the info from them. But today I decided to bring out ETC book one and Katie already loves it! We did the consonant pretest pages & she aced them (except a few where she really didn't know what word the picture was supposed to represent) so I know for sure the primers would be too easy for her. She is so excited about her new book, and she loves writing (even at her young age) so I really think this will be a much better fit for her than RME at this stage. (But we may still give RME a try later on when she's more mature.)

And finally, I have a couple of questions. In her reading, Elizabeth often mixes up saw & was, and also no & on. Is this normal? She just turned 6 last month. And when she's reading out loud, she often mixes up her articles, like saying "a" where the book has "the." I am thinking she's just busy focusing on the harder words & not paying that much attention to the smaller ones, because I know she really knows them. Does this seem normal also?

Thanks for any input.