Language Arts -- Spectrum Reading

We have a number of different ways we approach language
arts.

LD is a pretty good reader, so he's had "independent
reading" time each day for the past four or five months. He
chooses a book to read and reads quietly on his own. We
let him choose whatever he wants (not even offering suggestions
or comments about how easy/hard a book is).  We also
don't ask him anything about his reading except perhaps
what did you read, did you enjoy your book, or what was it
about? Not to prove anything to us, but just
conversationally.

Each day he also has to read aloud to me. We use the
Spectrum Reading books and we have three books for him
to choose from -- a Little Critters, Grade 2 book and the
general readers for Grades 3 and 4. These days he alternates
between the Little Critters and the Grade 4 book. He has to
read 3 or 4 pages of the Little Critter book, but just one
of the Grade 4 book as it has challenging words for him
such as "responsibility," "satisfying" or "aurora borealis"
(northern lights). These books have language arts questions
(such as arrange these words alphabetically, find the root
of these verbs, etc.) after every mini-story.

















LD also keeps a writing journal. This week I chose a sentence
from his reading selection and wrote it down in his journal
with various errors. He's had to be a reading sleuth and
find the problems in the sentence. The first day it was
challenging, but he's gotten the hang of it and found all the
errors today. It's a good way of reinforcing things like
capitalizing the first letter of the first word in a sentence
or placing a period/full stop at the end of the sentence.