Sonya-Pathway Readers

andream, sorry I’m not Sonya, but I saw your post had gone un-answered for a while, and since we’ve used Pathway readers for a few years now, I felt comfortable giving you my answer.

Our ds 8 1/2 is currently in More New Friends, and our dd7 is in New Friends. I still require them both to read aloud to me about once per week. This is not to check their reading skills or comprehension, because they are champs at those. Right now, I am working with both kids on elocution. I want them to practice reading aloud, as if they were reading to a group of people or to our family at bedtime. I feel this is an important skill for them to have, especially since I hope they’ll be reading aloud to their own children some day. We work on annunciating words, reading in a “good reading voice”, changing tone and pitch of our voice with exclamations and questions, and just overall on helping them to be good readers, both silently and aloud. In my opinion, elocution is a gateway into public speaking, so I want to develop this skill so that my children do feel comfortable speaking (or reading) in a public venue, should that opportunity ever present itself. If you’re simply concerned about their reading ability and/or comprehension, I would allow your child to read to him/herself out of your Pathway readers and then have them narrate to you what they read. If you see that they’re mastering this consistently, “turm them loose”, as you said.

I hope that wasn’t more than you were looking for.

Blessings,

Lindsey

I allowed my oldest to quit reading aloud to soon, and found out she was mumbling and skipping over words so I am very careful with the rest and in fact have started to have them all read aloud at least once a week for the same reason Lindsey said. Elocution. I hadn’t heard of this word until recently, but I already knew I wanted my children to be able to be comfortable in front of a crowd, so was doing these things just didn’t know there was a name for it!