Category: General Page 50 of 116

Christian received this in the mail today:

Kelly was a beautiful baby.  Happy Birthday!  We love you!

It can get really lonely when you are a long way from home.  I am 3000 miles away from all of my family.  I must admit that, being Milo’s son, I can’t lay claim to being from one of the more sophisticated branches of the Chapman clan.  Nevertheless, those more worldly wise members of the family have often treated us well in spite of our lack of cultivation.  I had no idea how much they really cared.  It seems that ever since we left the comforting and secure confines of rural Oregon, they have been quite worried about us.  They were actually quite beside themselves.  They knew that, while we were not exactly in the belly of the beast, we were close.  We are in the south and there is some limited safety in that.  Most of the folks out here are still pretty suspicious about the revenuers, but Raleigh is only a few hours drive south of Washington, D.C. and that kind of proximity is pretty scary.

My family really wanted to help, but felt they had little to offer, exhausted and depleted as they were after their own escalation of hostilities during the notorious Klamath Water Wars.  Still, they wanted to do something, they just could not think what.  They knew that Milo’s branch of the family is more into gladiolas than Glock’s, so they felt pretty helpless.  But then Merle’s boy, Travis hit on a solution.  I don’t know whether he had been talking to the North Idaho branch of the family, but the solution was perfect.  It turns out that there is something, readily available in all of Klamath County I understand, specifically designed for the sort of apocalyptic conditions we are facing.  It is the official Klamath Falls, Oregon, Obama Survival Kit.  Merle, his baby brother Mark, and Travis felt so strongly that I needed this, that they all chipped in and bought one for our little family.  Pure love.  I understand Mark put off buying a new varmit rifle and they put on a Rocky Mountain oyster pizza fund raiser, just sos they could get the money together to send us an Obama Survival Kit of our very own.  And here it is…

Obama Survival Kit

It consists entirely of a Mossy Oak® pattern camouflage NKJV Bible.  It brought a tear to my eye.  I am thinking about saving up, buying a case or two of these for our brothers up minding their stills in the hills west of here.

I just wanted you all to know how much we appreciated it.

The kids and I had an interesting discussion last night on the way home from our bible study about the frustration of learning difficult things.  We talked about three frustrations in particular even though I do not think we identified them specifically in a neat little list while we talked about them.  The frustrations were that some topics are 1) too vast to know everything about them (politics, economics, world religions), 2) too complicated to understand without lots of intense effort over months or years of study (mathematics, quantum mechanics, object oriented programming), and 3) too agenda filled to get to the truth from any one source (stem cell research, global warming, Christianity, homosexuality).  Many people are comfortable with what they know either because “they do not know what they do not know” or they do not feel a need to improve on the knowledge they already have.

Kelly started the conversation when she said, “Dad, you know why you believe stuff, but there are lots of things like economics, wars in different places, and other stuff like that, that I want to know about, but I am not so interested that I am willing to read a lot about them.  I know if I read World Magazine from cover to cover, I would know a lot more about those things than I do.  I try to do that, but I get really bored and end up only reading half or a quarter of the articles that don’t interest me.”

I gave her my standard lecture about how difficult it was for me to make the switch from sequential programming in C to object oriented programming in C++.  There was just too much stuff to learn all at once.  No one item is difficult by itself, but one has to get their arms around a ton of those not so difficult items all at once to make any sense of the whole.  One of the older guys saw my frustration and recommended I get my hands on several books and, more importantly start reading one of the programming trade rags (Dr. Dobbs Journal) on a regular basis.

He said, “There will be a lot of confusing information in those articles, but if you just skim through them, even if you do not understand what you read, you will have engaged with the vocabulary and one or two of the concepts for the topics.  Each time you read through the magazine, you will understand more of what you read.  Pretty soon, you will not only understand the stuff with which you are frustrated now, but you will be able to pick up brand new material more easily.  Mostly, remember that you will be confused when you get started on something new.  Just do not let that confusion frustrate you.”

That advise served me well.  We then talked about some of things Kelly had learned just that way, the most recent of which were probably knitting and Geometry, but which also includes riding a bicycle, reading, piano playing, intelligent design, analysis of world views, comic drawing, desktop publishing, and a broad range of other items.  The thing that might be a little different now is that the topics are getting broader and have people with different agendas demanding adherence to their viewpoints to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

So, in addition to the frustration of learning complex or vast things, there is the problem of knowing what is really true.  We then talked about the importance of knowing what we do not know.  We remembered some discussions with people who expressed very strong opinions based on false premises.  I explained that I have held (and probably still hold) very strong opinions that I based on false assumptions.  I told her that, in discerning what is true, our first attachment must be to love of God, then truth, but that they really go hand in hand in every circumstance if we take them deep enough.  This is a discussion I expect and hope will be an on-going one.  I know it was helpful for me to think about it.

I got a very embarrassing note from Lyle yesterday.  It said, “I see no one has posted for a while, hope you all are not gaining everything back.”  I have not thought about the weight loss death match (see the graph to the left of this post) for over a month.  Even worse, they put a bunch of pictures up on the bulletin at work from the company Christmas party yesterday.  I noticed that I looked a lot skinnier in those photos than I do now.  Mind you, I did not look skinny, just skinnier.  I got on the scale this morning and found I was up over two pounds from when I started the year.  Well, I am not the only one who has not posted for a long time.  There are unnamed others who have not posted for a long time either.  Lyle is the only one who has been faithful.  Guess what?  He is down a bunch already this year.  I have no excuse!  I have been walking all along, but I need to get back to a better focus on my eating habits and have a little self discipline.

Bryan?

We went to the Durham Performing Arts Center to see Fiddler on the Roof on Friday night.  It was an amazing good time.  The venue was absolutely fabulous.  It was easy to get there, the parking was easy going in and out, the theater itself was absolutely world class.  My immediate thought was that would be an incredible place to see an opera, Celtic Woman (we understand they will be at the DPAC in June this year), or anything else of the like.  Of course it was perfect for Fiddler.  It was especially gratifying because this was Chaim Topol’s farewell tour.  He is the actor who played Tevye in the 1980’s revival of Fiddler in London and in the popular movie of the same name.  We took Kelly’s new friend Jenna with us.  I do not think we could have picked a nicer event for Kelly’s fifteenth birthday present.  We got the least expensive seats available and we were quite a long ways from the stage, but there is really not a bad seat in the house.  The acoustics were amazing.  We will definitely do it again.  Even though it would not be necessary, we might even try to get some better seats.  We will definitely bring two or three sets of opera glasses instead of one.

Saturday, we spent most of the day driving around.  We had not been over to Beaver Creek for a long time, so we just decided to go there to hang out at the Borders bookstore for a couple of hours while Lorena shopped.    That is one of our most favorite things in the world to do.  We normally go to the Borders over by the Costco on the other side of Raleigh, but the shopping (other than Costco) is not so good for Lorena.  We always get a cup of coffee for me and a couple of hot chocolates with NO white chocolate sprinkles and enough whipped cream to make them taste good, but not so much as to make them difficult to drink.

Housekeeping note:  Last week I started a series of posts on how we prepare for CLEP tests.  I have decided I will write posts for that series on Wednesdays until I get caught up to where we are now.  After that, I will write posts as we move through the material.

Here’s the scarf that I finished last week:

Tonight we are all going to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Durham Performing Arts Center for my birthday. I am super excited!!! Jenna is coming with us, and that’s all she and I have been able to talk about for the past week. 🙂  To the dismay of my family, we’ve been singing showtunes and Disney songs to express our enthusiasm. I think ‘Matchmaker’ is happy. They think ‘Matchmaker’ is sappy. I tell ya. Anyway I was listening to the radio the other morning and the news announcer was talking about the play and how cool the venue was.  It’s also the star actor’s farewell tour, which makes going to the play that much more cool!That really made me MORE enthusiastic!!!! Yay! I’ll write about it on Monday.

I passed my CLEP psych finally! Thank goodness. Unfortunately I have a CLEP sociology coming up, and the material in that book looks way more politically correct than the material in my psych. book if that were possible. It’s OK though. Provides for some entertaining reading.

On Saturday we’re going to dissect a crayfish with the neighbor kids. Honestly, this critter has insides that are a lot more messed up than those of the worm. It’s going to be epic. 

I also finished my stripey scarf and started Thinkwell Precalculus! I love it! It’s a lot easier to understand, and really really easy for me to use. It’s also got plenty of extra material so if I get stuck I can go and look at it. I think this is going to be really good for me

If I were a rich man, Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum…

We got the sad news yesterday that our dear friend, Edie Plews passed away yesterday morning.  We met in Joe and Edie’s home in Newberg for Sunday morning fellowship meeting for many years.  We loved her very much.  Our condolences go out to all her friends and family.

Lorena will drive the kids to Johnston Community College in Smithfield this afternoon to take CLEP tests.  This will be Christian’s first.  He will take the Freshman College Composition.  He seems to be very well prepared so we are excited to see how he does.  It was a little scary, but a lot exciting and fun when Kelly took this same test as her first about a year ago.  Kelly will take the Introductory Psychology test.  I think she is pretty well prepared, too.  If they pass these tests, Kelly will move on to take US History II and Christian will take Western Civilization I.

We have been thinking about what to do for a third language.  We really were not thinking about doing another romance language, but are starting to rethink that a little.  Our problem is time and resources.  We have wanted to study a language for a year or two, then go someplace as a family for a six to eight week immersion course in the summer.  Lorena has always been enamored with the idea of learning French.  Quebec is within driving distance and we have friends there.  So, now French, along with Russian and Mandarin, is on the table.  We pretty much have to decide what we are going to do within the next two or three months.  We want to have at least one full year of Rosetta Stone behind us before we go.  Of course the kids do not have to stop at three languages, but the older one gets, the harder it is to learn a language well.  Any thoughts on this by any of you will be grateful considered.

Interesting old post:  When I checked my blog statistics page this morning, I noticed that someone had visited this old post on socialization.  It was not that what I had written was so interesting, nor was it the really bad comic that I drew.  It was how the reader found the link to that particular post.  It seems they had performed a Google search on Koehler “Socialization Skills in Home Schooled Children”.  I think the thing they were looking for was this document that describes a study that compares Socialization Skills in Home Schooled Children Versus Conventionally Schooled Children.  I read through that very interesting document again, making a note to myself to recommend it to people who have sincere questions about this subject.

Results:  Woo-hoo!  They both passed.  Kelly is now up to 24 credit hours earned.  Christian has his first 6.  Congrats to both of them.

The vast majority of the big events in my life have involved waiting in hallways. Waiting to take a test, waiting to play the piano, waiting to receive a set of scores…  Last weekend I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair next to three other girls in similar uncomfortable plastic chairs.  One was playing air-piano, another was staring at nothing, and the third sat with her chin in her hand, looking very thoughtful. As I sat there, clutching my books and trying not to hyperventilate, the silence seemed to grow stronger (it usually does in these situations) and every note the first girl tapped on her music book almost seemed to make the atmosphere more awkward and tense.  I don’t know if everyone else felt that way, but I know I did. It may be due to the fact that in my household, it’s rarely quiet for more than two minutes.  I don’t know.

Anyway I broke the silence. I had to for the sake of my sanity and to take my mind off of the upcoming performance. I’m glad I did! We all talked.  We talked about piano and piano teachers and piano practice and piano lessons. We talked about school and New York City and Monterrey Mexico and homeschooling and little brothers and the environment.  We talked about the weather, we talked about the city, we talked about the country, we took and gave piano advice and wished each other luck. And then one by one we went to play in front of a couple of harried and hurried adjudicators.

That’s the cool thing about waiting in hallways with people. It’s almost like a mini party or something. That’s why I always force myself to speak up. However..

Although it is good to speak up sometimes, one must always remember the old adage ‘Silence is golden’. Observe:

We were coming back from an orthodontist appointment today, and Mom decided to stop by a local cake bakery to look around for my birthday.  When we walked in, I decided to be mature and ask a question. So (without a second thought) I asked the elderly clerk:

“Do you do cakes here?”

He replied with a long drawn smart remark, asking me if birds fly, if there was water in the Pacific ocean, and if there was snow on Mt. Everest.

I’m having brownies this year.

YEARS LATER NOTE: Since using these programs, the kids described here graduated Magna Cum Laude in Statistics (Kelly) and Summa Cum Laude with Honors in Applied Mathematics (Christian) from a large state university. At the writing of this note (June 30, 2016), they are both midway through PhD programs at national research universities here in the United States. You can read more about that here.

In the last post about math, I wrote about why we switched from Singapore Math to Teaching Textbooks when the kids started Algebra at the request of a friend.  We are huge fans of both of those programs.  They served us well with both Kelly and Christian who learn in very different ways.  We planned to stick with Teaching Textbooks through Precalculus.  The kids understand the system, like it, and performed well on standardized tests after using it.  At this writing, Precalculus is a relatively new program for Teaching Textbooks.  We had previously purchased Thinkwell Precalculus because it was so highly recommended by Sonlight, the company from which we have purchased the vast bulk of our homeschool materials.

The Thinkwell Precalculus program sat on a shelf for about six months while Kelly finished Teaching Textbooks Geometry.  Like all the other Teaching Textbooks programs we had tried so far, their Geometry program is stellar.  Kelly could listen to a lecture, read the same material in a textbook, and get help with exercises she did not understand well.  She knows how to use the system and now has a thorough understanding of Geometry.  The Teaching Textbooks system works so well for us that I got to wondering whether or not I should have switched to Thinkwell for Precalculus.  The upshot is that I went ahead and bought the Teaching Textbooks Precalculus program, too.  At this point, there are no video lectures with the program like in the previous ones.  We thought that would not be too much of an impediment.

Kelly started the Teaching Textbooks program several weeks ago.  Some of the lessons went very well, but about a third of the lessons required a significant amount of explanation on my part.  Kelly and I like to work together and I do math for a living so that is not such a big deal.  Still, she was frustrated because she felt like she understood the material when she read the text, but was often unable to answer the exercise questions correctly.  Kelly gets math.  She performed very well in previous math oriented materials and on standardized tests.  Last night she did Lesson 16 and struggled again.  This is exactly the wrong time for her to get a bad taste in her mouth for math just because the materials are not well suited for the way she learns.

I did not know what to do because I did not want her to be frustrated with this important material.  Then, I remembered that we have a completely different system that is highly recommended by Sonlight.  They sell Saxon Advanced Math, the program that covers Precalculus, but say this at the bottom of the page the describes that product:

Sonlight is happy to sell you this product. We want to make sure, however, that you are familiar with the Thinkwell Pre-Calculus, which we recommend as “Best in Category.”

After correcting Kelly’s assignment last night and talking to her about it, I thought we might go ahead and crack open the Thinkwell materials and take a look.  We were amazed.  It really looks like a wonderful program.  Not only did we look at the introductory materials, but we watched the instructional video that describes the material with which Kelly was struggling in Lesson 16 of Teaching Textbooks.  It was presented with a level of clarity with which we had previously come to expect from Teaching Textbooks.  We decidee to switch systems starting today.  I watched her go through the tutorial on how to do the exercises, then do some of the exercise questions.  The whole program is very well thought out and has what we believe is a better record keeping system than Teaching Textbooks.  The one area where Teaching Textbooks appears to be superior is in the way that they provides such clear explanations on how to work the problems when a student gets stuck.  We have not used Thinkwell long enough, though, to make too strong of a statement on that.

Since we have so little experience with Thinkwell to say that it will be better than the Teaching Textbooks in its final incarnation we will reserve judgement for now.  Still, the Thinkwell Precalculus certainly looks better for us now than the current state of the Teaching Textbooks Precalculus.  I will write about this more when we have a few months experience with the program, and then again after Kelly does some more standardized testing.

Links:
Teaching Textbooks Precalculus
Thinkwell Precalculus
Saxon Advanced Math

We went to lunch at Mo’s yesterday with Troy and Youngin.  I do not know if it was what I ate there or something I ate later, but I paid a BIG price last night for whatever it was.  We had a good weekend.  That is all I have time to write this morning.

Ever since Troy finished this project*, Lorena has been busting my chops.

She says, “Why can’t you be more like Troy.”

I say, “Well to start with, he has a lot more hair than me…”

Thick in the head though I tend to be, after over a year in our new house, I have come up with a plan that could bring a us some missing joy, peace, and furniture.  When we moved to North Carolina, we were able to buy a house that is two good sized rooms larger than the one we owned in Oregon.  Those rooms are very, very painful to Lorena.  I think some people are born with a decorating gene that some others of us lack.  Lorena can hardly stand the site of an empty room.  The problem is that, with the tight economy and its associated insecurities, it is hard to know how to deal with the problem in a financially responsible way.

All of the members of our little family are much, much happier when we have a project on which to work.  That is particularly true when the end of the projects leaves us something to admire and enjoy.  Shortly after Lorena and I got married, we stripped and repainted an old white dresser that my sister, Jean helped me buy at a thrift store when I first moved to Corvallis to work at a now defunct robot company name Intelledex.  We found maple under the ugly white paint.  We sanded it and put some lacquer on it.  We did not do a perfect job because there were some fairly minor defects about which we could not do much.  Still, it is a beautiful, sturdy, and serviceable piece that we LOVE.  A big chunk of that love is due to the fact that we did it ourselves.  We have refinished a table and a couple of other pieces deriving great joy from each one.

It is possible to buy pieces that are worthy of restoration.  We even have an old chair from my college days and a rocking chair given to us buy a dear friend from our Florida (Earl Shuck) days.  When he got cancer, he told his wife that he wanted us to have that chair when he died.  We value it greatly.   Lorena has been wanting to restore those pieces for a long time.  We now have to decide whether to buy some stuff that we be more fitting to put in our empty rooms, take on the college chair with a kind of restoration we have never tried (we have done wood refinishing, but not reupholstering), or just start cruising garage sales and consignment stores until something obvious pops up.  I vote for the garage sale/consignment store option, but I am not the boss of this effort.  I will leave that for the unnamed person in our household of strong opinons about these subject.  I found it is safest just to follow or stay out of the way when these kinds of decisions are required.

Lorena has accumulated a list of consignment stores.  Maybe she can get Youngin to go with her.  I think that might even be a Troy kind of thing.  I think Christian, Kelly, and I might work on the radio, crafts, Betty Blonde, and homeschool while we let Lorena do the exploring.  We will keep you posted.

*I had to rifle through a LOT of posts to find the one with the tables on Troy and Youngin’s blog.  It does not seem like it was so long ago that they started the thing and they have compiled quite a record of their activities.  It dawned on me as I was looking through it that they have a GREAT blog.  There is lots of good stuff there.  I vote that they do not forget both more bird posts and more food posts, both with pictures.  Congrats you guys!

Yesterday, I wrote (here) a little bit about how Kelly and Christian learned how to read.  Luke from the Sonlight and Homeschooling blog made a comment about the success of the reading dogs program in getting shy children to read.  That made me think of a couple of special advantages my family enjoyed when it came to education.  The first and maybe the greatest was the gift of a love for education that probably started with our grandmother, Grandma Sarah’s mom.  Ida Jenkins was a small woman, the daughter of very poor Finnish immigrants who spoke only Finnish for the first eight years of her life.  She had to wait until she was eight years old so her younger brother was old enough to go to school with her as they had to row a rowboat five miles each direction across Tenmile Lake and their parents did not want them to go alone.  She taught third grade at Harrison Elementary School after having gotten a teaching certificate from Oregon Normal School.  I think she must have gotten the certificate some time in the 1930’s. She admonished and advocated for my siblings and I while we attended school at Harrison for our early elementary years.

Grandma valued education greatly and instilled that love in our mother who graduated from Oregon State University in 1952 with a bachelors degree in pharmacy.  She and another woman were one of only two women in their class, the second and third women to ever graduate as pharmacists from Oregon State.  The competition for grades was fierce in those years as many of the students were veterans of the World War II and the Korean War, serious about getting a later than usual college education so they could on with life and support their already growing families.  Grandma J. and our kid’s Grandma Sarah were passionate about education.  Grandma Sarah gets genuinely excited about people who finish their college well.  That excitement has been an encouragement in all my educational endeavors.  I truly want to pass the gift of that excitement along to my children.

The second advantage we enjoyed was that we did not have a television in the house when we were growing up.  The motivation for our not having a television when we were children was mostly religious.  Almost no one in our church had a television.  We were slightly embarrassed about that and tried to make up for it by reading as much as possible so we could talk about the things the other kids saw on television.  I guess the thinking was that if we read the book, we could at least sound like we might have seen the movie.  It did not work so well with the weekly television programs.  I well remember the first family in our neighborhood who got a color television set and the excitement around the school centered around the first full color episode of Bonanza.  We kind of got stuck on the outside looking in.  What we did not realize is that, even in those days when television programming was a lot more wholesome than it is today, the fact that we did not have a television gave us a huge academic advantage.  I think the greatest benefit for us kids was that it gave us a whole lot more time to read, play, do projects, and engage with other people than those kids whose parents let them watch a lot of TV.

It is kind of funny.  Now, when I tell people we do not have a television a typical response is, “Good on ya!”  Even the kids are proud to not have a television.  Still, we try to find appropriate ways to enage with video and television so the kids are not completely divorced from popular culture.  Now, though, when secular and materialistic worldviews, bad morals, and other negative influences are added to the waste of time, we make a big effort to manage their use of those media.  I think that not having a television in the house is still a huge academic advantage.  Now we just need to figure out what to do about the internet.

I know I’ve been writing an awful lot about my crafty projects lately, but I finally got some pictures of my amigurumi, and I really want to share them with you all! So here are the pictures, before y’all get sick of me.

P.S.!!!  Dad… can you help me out with these???

So the first is a picture of my first two attempts. Tigger was my first one, then Piggly.  The third one on the left in the second picture is one that I’m making for Jenna, my neighbor friend. She wanted a pig too. I am almost finished with it! It just needs a pair of legs.  The last picture is what they are all supposed to look like.

I am slaving away at my math homework today.  Pretty intense stuff. Dad had to read through one of my math lessons with me yesterday and explain it all to me. We haven’t done that for a long time, because most of the time I can understand it on my own. But it was very helpful! Thankfully, Dad enjoys doing that kind of thing (or at least it seems like he enjoys it 🙂 )

Soooo back to finding the zeros of polynomial equations. 😛 Ta-ta!

Both of the kids learned how to read when they were four. I do not think that is an especially impressive achievement. I think many if not most could do the same with the right encouragement and tools.  Kelly and Christian loved to play the Reader Rabbit computer game.  We read to them a lot, often repetitively.  Kelly memorized The Owl and the Pussycat from hearing it so often when she was three.  We worked with the kids to memorize scripture from a very young age.  I think all those things worked together to help the kids learn to read pretty early.  Watching the kids learn to read was one of the greatest joys of my life.  I am not sure about the process through which Kelly passed on her way to reading.  I am sure it was gradual, but it seemed like it happened over night.  One day she went from quoting poetry we had read her and playing Reader Rabbit to reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes played a big part in Christian’s path to reading fluency, too, but his path was not as direct as Kelly’s.  As far as we could tell, Christian did all the same things as Kelly to give him a base from which to learn.  He memorized a lot of scripture, finished two our three Reader Rabbit disks, and listened to an hour or two of read alouds every day.  Still, he did not take up reading until we found a mechanism for teaching him.  It became very clear that Christian and Kelly learn differently.  It might be a left brain, right brain thing.  I am not sure.  I just know that they learned how to read in very different ways.  When Kelly read well at a fairly age, it was such I gift, I wanted Christian to have it too.  So, I decided to make a plan.

I wanted the process to be interesting to Christian because I wanted him to have a love for reading.  I knew that part of that interest could take the form of he and I spending time together.  We both loved that, but that was not really enough.  I wanted him to have more than just a desire to spend time with his dad.  I wanted him to love reading for reading’s sake.  I started through a number of reading programs.  The first two or three did not work at all.  At that time, we often went to the Christian Supply bookstore in Beaverton, Oregon on Saturdays because they had a very good homeschool section there.  I found a set of workbooks called Explode the Code.  I bought the first couple of books.  I did not have a lot of expectations at the time about whether these would work or not because we had already decided several other systems were too tedious, not effective, or too expensive.

I do not know how well these books will work for other teacher/child combinations, but Explode the Code turned out to be perfect for us.  The reason we liked them was because Christian and I could complete two or three pages from one of the books in about fifteen minutes.  It was truly amazing.  He worked through the first twelve books (1-6.5) in about four months and could read.  I sat there for fifteen minutes per day for four months and watched him learn to read.  The only thing I added to the process were a few minor prompts and corrections.  He did the rest.  What a gift.  I do not know if that would would work for every child, but I bet it would work for a lot of them.  It was a joyful thing for both of us.

After we got through those first twelve books, we switched to Junie B. Jones.  He read all of them aloud to me.  They were interesting to both of us.  In the past, he had leafed through Calvin and Hobbes comic books looking at the drawings.  Now he would read them to himself, laugh, and read them to the other members of the family.  A lot of the words in Calvin and Hobbes were big ones, so he did not always read them correctly.  Sometimes, the thing he laughed about was not really the point of the strip.  Still, both Kelly and Christian read both Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot comic books a lot.  I think it was tremendously beneficial for their reading fluency.  More than that, they had something they truly loved to read.

Imagine how much more useful education would take place in America if every child had someone who was willing to sit with them for fifteen minutes per day for six months and listen to them read.  I honestly believe that is all it would take for the vast majority of children to read fluently.  I think the fact that an interested adult is looking on is more important than the method used.  We have some friends who are about the age of my parents who visited a public school close to them after their retirement three days per week to listen to kids read.  I do not know why any parent would not want to do that for their child.  If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.