The Middle-of-the-Beginning

By Children Rising | November 26, 2012

My student is so enthusiastic, that meeting him was more like a plunge into his life than the casual greetings that I usually have with my peers.
In quick succession, I learned that Erick likes the Mario Brothers, tigers, spiders, animals in general, video games, blue, playing video games with his friends, Super Smash Bothers, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS…there were so many things that he liked, many of them related to Mario. Erick also has siblings, including a younger sister that he reads to sometimes.

In the few weeks that we have met to learn together, Erick has mastered over 150 sight words–these are words that do not follow phonics rules, yet make up about 70% of what you are reading right now! (Some examples: the, has, these, about, right, you, what, many, little, I etc.)
We take game breaks because Erick has so much energy. Once I wrote a sentence for him to read and asked him show me with our play figures as we worked on short ‘o’ sounds: “The frog jumped over the block.” Instead of taking the little frog and hopping it over the block, he put a box of crayons on the ground and leaped over it as well as any frog could hope.

We’ve flown through five short books already, and I’m looking forward to introducing more complex books. I hope that as our material gets more challenging, Erick will continue to leap forward with as much enthusiasm as he put into being the frog…or perhaps he was imagining himself as Super Mario?