ACE

The 2 that Ki are doing are fine. partly because I am reading it with him and we do the questions together.

The ones that Gavin and Connor are doing are awful. I'm sorry, They are just awful. It's like useless memorization of exact words. It's just rote memory. And very, very wordy. Very much unnecessarily so- to the point it bores and confuses.

But it did show me a weakness in Gavin's reading. He hasn't read outloud forever. He does fine with 'reading for fun' books, but has always struggled with 'reading to retain information' stuff. I thought breaking into smaller pieces would work. I tell him to just read one page at a time and see what questions he can answer after just reading the one page.

I had him read outloud. He gets to a big word, sees the first 3 letters and makes a wild guess- STILL, at 15 yrs old. And then he has no idea what they are talking about. it's something you can get away with when reading Science Fiction. If I have him read it again and read the entire word- he gets 2/3 the way through the big word and takes another guess. Then I tell him to read that word, look at each letter and finally he'll read it with all the letters and get what the word is.

But, I really do no like their ACE books. I do, however, plan on doing these PACS we have. Though they are boring and wordy, they all wanted to try something 'curriculum like' and all planned out and there for them to do. And I think that it'll be good for them. Half the stuff in adult life is boring and wordy and they'll need to know how to deal with it.