The basic rundown is that one day on the weekend you drop everything on the hour, every hour, from 9-5ish and take a moment to have your child read to you for practice's sake. At the end of the day they get a prize.
Our kidlets love Readathons.
Unfortunately(?) their reading skills are no longer lacking, and the readathon—while much enjoyed—could be time better spent on other skills needing some honing.
And I'm tired of tossing out prizes (dinky cars, Lego minifigures, Trashies, Kinder Eggs, whatever's left in the prize bucket) for easy-peasy acts.
Oh no, Mom doesn't hand out prizes for nothing—you need to work for these little mofos, children.
Enter the math-athon. My oldest needs math practice. The youngest does not. And nothing viscerally irks the one that needs help more than having his little brother bouncing with the answer because it comes easily to him.
I get it. Know-it-alls
Thus it became evident that we needed to manage the oldest's morale by handing a not-so-likeable task to the youngest in order to keep said frustration in check. Enter the printathon...
Yes, our six year old is in grade one and his printing is
Handily, he's been sent home with sight words to be used for quizzing him on his reading—200+ sight words the kid got right the first time through and clearly doesn't need to study in order to repeat the act.
These same booklets I'm repurposing as source words for his printing.
And after a few printathons over the Christmas holidays, he's already showing improvement.
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| Believe it or not, that's improvement. |
Now that he's focusing on an area he needs to work on, his know-it-all attitude has also been knocked down a peg and his older brother isn't nearly so defensive and defeated when approaching his own studies (the hated beast that is math).
I'll call this a win.
