Thanks for so many helpful suggestions! I'll try lots of them.
I hear the response about not asking quiz style questions. The part she was reading yesterday was pretty funny. We laughed a lot and for some reason the "that is so funny" let the conversation break naturally, and we could talk about aspects of the book without her feeling like I was interrupting.
Psychland: I am concerned about her getting the phonics because I'm not sure how she learned to read but it wasn't that way. I think it was a combination of just being good at memorizing words and deduction. If I say a word once, she generally gets it forever. But when she does mispronounce a word, I see why she chose that incorrect pronunciation so I'm not sure how to phonetically teach.
The school has a computer program that the kids use to learn to read, and they are tested on it every month. It tests overall reading, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, alphabetic decoding and vocabulary. The only area she's consistently moved up in is vocabulary, but I have no idea how to read the results because it gives normed percentiles (against other K students) and there is a very early reading ceiling to the work involved. Her scores were lower in letter knowledge this month than they were in the first month of school. Letter knowledge? How can that be?
Can I trust that if she knows all of the words in the phonemic awareness section by sight that she's actually learning phonics by doing the program or should I be looking at something else for her? Her phonemic awareness score the first month of school was higher than it was this month. I don't know if that means she's running into blends she doesn't know or if she just couldn't hit the little asteroid in the test game or whatever. I've got to admit, the lower results on the letter awareness score really thow me off.
I could ask the teacher, but I really want to pick battles carefully and am hoping to figure out this stuff on my own.
Thanks again!
