Stamina building

 WoW!  We have been continuing to build our stamina for our independent work times: read to self, listen to reading, and work on writing. I am pleased to report that we have consistently been able to read for 20-23 minutes for the last week!!! We graph in each day to show our growth which the kids love seeing. As you can see we've made some nice gains but have slowly worked our way up to this amount of time.
Listen to reading has not taken us nearly as long to build our stamina but the independence of this area is much easier to master. We have lots of books on tape as well as on CD's. This area promotes reading fluently and with expression in addition to decoding and comprhension.

Oh that reminds me, if anyone has an old battery operated, personal cassette player (Walkman)  laying around the basement that they no longer use, we would love to take it off your hands. Please let me know.

We are currently working on learning the routines associated with our last 2 independent areas: read to someone and word work. More on those later.