Owen loved the notes that I included with his snack the first few days of school, and asked if I would keep doing it. “I don’t eat one bite of snack before I read my note,” he told me. What a sweet compliment!
Unfortunately, it is a little more difficult than I originally anticipated. While Owen is working on reading lots of words, and is quite successful, I feel that it is safer to stay with words that I am confident he knows. I certainly don’t want reading one of my notes to be frustrating to him while he is so motivated to read.
This limits my notes to words with short vowels and a few sight-words that he has memorized. So it gets tricky trying to come up with something interesting to say while choosing from a select group of words.
Thus his notes have gone from “I love you.” and “You make me happy.” straight to “This snack is yum-yum for the tum-tum.” and “Do NOT get bigger!” Luckily Owen finds it all entertaining…
Yesterday, while picking Owen up from school, I vaguely remembered that I had written a word in his note that I thought he might not be able to read.
Me: Did you read your note today?
Owen: (Ferociously) I DID read it! And it IS true! And we ARE doing it!
Yikes! Then I remembered that the word was actually words: Katie and Sarah.
I was taking a risk using names other than Jack, Mama, or Charlotte. But I should have known that reading Katie and Sarah’s names would not be a problem.
The note, and the promise were a hit. Owen immediately took the note from his schoolbag and read it to our friend Gail. Jack commandeered the note at that point sensing that it had some kind of magic power. In the car, he tried to make the magic note work like he had seen Owen do. Unfortunately for Jack, the magic only belonged to Owen. None of Jack’s readings came true. No various “poopie” objects, nor cookies, nor a cat appeared…
By the way, Owen DID read the note, and it WAS true, and we DID have lunch with Katie and Sarah at Qdoba. We even let Jack join in on the magic.
No comments:
Post a Comment