Happy Birthday!-- Blog 3

"Happy Birthday, Rachael!!". Those are the words I hear almost everyday from a little boy we will call Wucius (thats how he says Yoosh's name). He says that to everyone pretty much everyday, no matter if it's your birthday or not. I have been working with Wucius one on one a lot lately and I am starting to realize his skills and his weaknesses. Whenever they learn about a new subject or person or activity they always do a reading from the projector about whatever they are learning. The kids who want to read can read a paragraph out loud and they the teacher will re-read the paragraph so they can understand. Well when Wucius reads a paragraph he always wants to read first, no matter how big that particular paragraph is. He starts out pretty good with a few hints here and there, but the deeper into the paragraph the worse he gets. Today we were learning about "The Proper Way To Wash Your Hands". Wucius, of course, wanted to read the very first (very thick) paragraph. When he raised his hands to read Lowa said "How about you wait and you'll get first dibs on the second paragraph?" Wucius replied "I can read this one.", "Well go ahead!". As he went further and further into the paragraph words like "viruses" turned into "very" and "bacteria" turned in to "asparagus" (don't ask me how, but that's what happened). I sat beside him helping him with the words that he was having trouble with, but that one made me giggle. The ways that we improve his reading skills is they make up a list of words that he has trouble with and then we put them on flash cards and he reads them and says them back to us. This works really well because mostly the words are the (to us) simple, common words like "can", "have", "ask", etc. Well during their independent study time I was flashing these words to him. The word "ask" appeared.

"Aks."
"Read it again."
"Aks."
"No, its ask."
"Aks."
"No. Ask."
"Aks!"
"Okay. Say Aaah."
"Aaaah."
"Now Ssss."
"Ssss."
"Now Kkka."
"Kkka."
"Okay, now all together!
"Aks"
"No! Aaahh Sssss Kkkka!"
"Aks!!"
"Next word."

That was probably the funniest and most frustrating thing I have ever had to deal with in that class. I don't know why, but he just couldn't say "Ask" correctly. Kate even came over and did the same sounding out thing that I did, but he still said "Aks". Ohhhh the things I go through for them.