Hello Calico! (2007-08-30)

(Originally posted on 30 August 2007.)

Every day this summer, Giggles has been doing some reading to keep up and develop her skills so she's ready for Grade 2. At the beginning of summer I drew up a chart indicating periodic rewards - stickers every 9th line, and larger rewards after every 50 lines.

To fill in one line at the beginning of summer required her to read one simple story. As time progressed and she got better at it, the requirements have become increasingly demanding, so that for the past three weeks it's been 15 to 20 minutes of reading for every line. And whereas at the beginning of summer, one simple 16-page book with about 4-6 words per page would take her 10 minutes to work through, by now she's getting through those in two minutes and reading the longer, more challeging level 2 "Ready to Read" books in about 8-10 minutes.

Yesterday she even picked up one of her regular picture books "to see if I could read it" - and she was very excited to see that she could read a lot of the words!! She came running and demanded to read it to me right away. So we read it more or less together, with me cueing her for the harder words (and some of the easier words too, to keep her motivation up). Today she reread most of it for Laolao, as well as one of her other picture books (which are essentially graded readers, too, but a somewhat more advanced level than she's been reading up to now).

I am VERY pleased to see her gaining confidence and tackling harder books. But she had to come to it herself. If I had suggested she read Bambi there would have been major dissent, complaining and general refusal (as there is most every time I suggest she try a more challenging book). But seeing as it was her idea, she was gung-ho!

All that to say that today she came to the last line in the chart (which means she's read on average three times a day, six days a week, for the past nine weeks). The grand prize at the end of it all was - A GUINEA PIG!!!!!

She was so excited last night she had trouble going to sleep and woke repeatedly during the night. Today after I got home from work, we went to the pet store and bought a 6-week old female Abyssinean guinea pig, whom we have named Calico for her colouring. She's a pretty black, white, and brown-gold coulour. For now we have a makeshift cage made out of a large cardboard box. We'll buy or devise something more proper in the coming days.