Book Board Chat

Good Evening Everyone.

Have been following along with everything.

Belated Happy Birthday Maureen!

Glad you are being taken well care of grano.

Anyway, as a reasonable mentally deranged person [I have brain connection problems, these are not self induced derangements]. Anyway, I am tutoring again. And a 5th grade boy I am tutoring is having difficulties improving his reading fluency. I've done my normal tricks. He is improving [but frankly not as much as I think he his capable of]. English is basically a second language to him [though his spanish is probably atroicious]. My normal procedures at this point is to move into poetry. BUT what sort of poetry would a 5th grade boy like???? With girls I bounce back and forth between seveeral poets [I've found robert frost works well. -- me and poetry are not fluent. Remember my brain connection problems. I did not 'get' rhymes/poetry until 9th grade. I could 'get' the beat but the rhyme aspect missed me to then. I just learned 'tricks' to cover for it. Anyway, in 9th grade I figured out hymns were 'poems' and that Dr. Seus finally rhymed and was fun to read -- it did not rhyme before that to me. Of course, I do NOT hear sounds generally when I read. I have to force myself to hear sounds when reading poetry silently. So it is a lot of work. But prior to 9th grade I did not hear the rhymes outloud either.]

Anyway -- you guys KNOW poetry.

It has to be shortish. And various ones in case something doesn't HIT. Or we just change to a new poem to variety.

He is a boy from a fairly macho culture but likes the idea of being a gentleman and playing chess. He has lost interest in 'fiction' stuff and we have been focused on non-fiction readings and science in particular. He has improved nicely on the vowel beginning words [where I have found the esl have the most difficulty with] and hardly pauses before 'organic', 'ignite', 'extinguish', 'inital' and so on. And frankly, some of the stuff he is reading is sixth grade science. [he does have problems with comparisions of stuff but we're working on that].

essentially he is reading outloud at say 60% of where he should be. something with a nice strong beat a couple/three of hundred to develope a 'flow/beat' would probably do the trick.

HELP short male poems needed.

Anyway. I do not think this boy will go for Frost. In fact, for tomorrow I am going to print a copy of the Gettysburg address to kick up his reading fluency a notch. [I have noticed that 'official' speech like things also work well. And there are some great words there to work on increasing his vocabulary.