Lesson 100, lesson 101, and lesson 250

In each lesson of "Teach your child to read" the tutor reads a script, printed in small pink letters. The child reads phonemes, words, sentences, and eventually stories, printed in large black letters. The print shrinks gradually from lesson 1 to lesson 100, never to the adult size. It switches suddenly from the Distar font at lesson 74. 

At lesson 53, the stories start to have titles. Here it is without the Distar:

lots of cars

a man on a farm has lots of cars. he has old cars. he has little cars.

are his cars for goats? no. 

are his cars for sheep? no. 

are his cars for cows? no.

his cars are for cops. he has lots of cop cars.

Upper case is introduced close to the end. Here's the story in lesson 100:

Hunting for Tigers—Part 2.

An old man was shooting at a tiger.

The tiger sat down and started to sing. The old man shot. This shot hit a rock. A bug was in back of that rock. "Stop making this rock jump," the bug shouted.

But the old man did not stop shooting. The man shot a hole in the sand. An ant said, "Thank you, that is a good ant hole."

The tiger kept singing and the man kept shooting. Then the man stopped. He said, "I am out of shots. So I must stop hunting."

The tiger came over and licked the old man on the nose. The old man said, "You can not do that. Tigers do not lick. They bite."

The tiger said, "Not this tiger. I am a tame tiger." Then the tiger said "I love to lick noses and I love to sing."

The old man said, "I must get out of here, but I can not see. So I can not find my house." 

The tiger said, "I will take you home if you give me a good coat."

So now the tiger has a tiger coat and a coat from the old man. And the old man has no coats.

This Is the Last Ending.

I was anticipating this last lesson throughout the second half of the book. I loved and Maria accepted spending 30 minutes a day like this. It's likely it was good for her. The school was (and remains) closed. So what should we do for lessons 101-200?

The story in lesson 100 fills a page of the book, so maybe she could read a page out of a children's book every day. The epilogue to "Teach your child to read" suggests something like this:

It might seem that if your child has mastered the first steps in decoding, the child should easily be able to read other material that is ostensibly designed for beginning reading, such as the easy-to-read books that are advertised in stores and on TV. The problem is that your child probably reads at the second-grade level (if the child has completed the program successfully). Most of these books are written for the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade level. Most of them contain an outrageous vocabulary. The best of them are good listening books, but not very good reading books for the neophyte reader.

However, of the incredibly large group of children's books that is available, there are a handful that can be presented with some preteaching to a child who reads at the second-grade level. Below is a list of twenty books that you can introduce. 

That was written in 1983, I don't know if the landscape of children's books or the meaning of "3rd grade level" has changed since then. But I ordered some off of their list a few weeks before we finished the book. I was ready to go with "Mine's the Best" by Crosby Bonsall for lesson 101. But it was clear when I got it that it would be good for only one session: it is 30 pages long but with only 3 or 4 words on each page. "Nate the Great" was good for three sessions. Keeping it up every day took more thinking. 

This blog is for keeping track of that thinking. I started writing them myself. Here's a lesson from last week, I haven't been counting but let's call it lesson 250:

Bricks, wood, and stone

In Sumer there was always plenty of mud. The people living in Ancient Mesopotamia learned how to make bricks out of the mud. But those bricks did not last for very long. Archaeologists think that they might have started to crumble after just fifty years. So fifty centuries later, they can't find many Sumerian buildings.

Do you think that Gilgamesh and Enkidu would have liked to live in a building made out of cedar wood, instead of mud brick? But even cedar wood cannot last for fifty centuries. Bricks and wood won't last for fifty centuries. Will any buildings last for fifty centuries?

Stone buildings can last for a hundred centuries! Long before Sumer, long before Uruk was built in Lower Mesopotamia, there were people making big stone buildings. Somebody made a big stone temple in Upper Mesopotamia. Do you remember what we call that temple now?

Who built Gobekli Tepe? We don't know much about them. They didn't have writing.

The Ancient Egyptians did have writing. They had hieroglyphic writing. And they buried their pharaohs in big stone buildings called pyramids. When the pharaoh died, they wrapped him in linen, and they put his mummy into a golden coffin, and they put that coffin into a big pyramid.

And do you know what? We know the name of the man who built the first pyramid. His name was Imhotep.

That's supposed to be nonfiction. Corrections welcome.