Hi! I apologize up front for the long post.
DS (1st grade, just turned 7) only gets 1 homework assignment per night - reading a 'baggie book' given by the school and then, the next day, reading a short passage from the text to check for fluency and then doing a retell for the teacher to check for comprehension. (His school uses DRA). We were told the baggie books would always be a level or 2 below their level, and he's bringing level 24 books home now. DS LOVES to read. Reading the baggie books is not an issue - he does it willingly, even though he's not thrilled at having to read each one 2 times (the school says they want 3 times, but we let him read to self once and read aloud once). And when he's done reading his baggie book he gets out his own books for pleasure - and they are definitely above the level 24 of the baggie book.
The issue comes when we ask him to do the retell (for the baggie books or his personal choice books). He hems and haws and stalls and throws tantrums and does everything in his power not to do it. In my experience, he understands what he's read, and if he's asked questions about it, he can answer them very accurately. But for some reason putting the pieces together on his own seems to be a big challenge. If he's pressed hard, he can do it, very reluctantly, using vocab direct from the reading and with good detail. But at school they can't/won't press him that hard to do it. They write notes telling me it's OK to take more than 1 day to read a book, and this past week sent home a writing summary page and he was only allowed to do one chapter per day and had to do a written summary of each chapter. But that didn't seem to help matters - even with only 1 chapter (and a chapter of Young Cam Jansen isn't very long, maybe 3-4 pages) he still acted like we were killing him any time we wanted him to do a retell. At school they say he needs numerous prompts (what happened next? then what? etc) and that lowers his grade for the book. It's the same way at home - once he starts he'll summarize then stop. Then I need to prompt him, and he'll continue briefly and then stop. And we continue this way until the end of the book.
So I'm at a loss - am I pressing him too hard or having too high expectations? I personally feel there is no good reason that he should have to take a whole week to read through one of these books by doing one chapter per night, but he's not doing a satisfactory job of summarizing for the teachers. Could there be some underlying issue that we or the school are overlooking? Has anyone else had a similar experience with their DC that they would share?
Thanks for the advice!
