This post was sponsored by Sagebooks. All opinions are mine and mine alone. 

There is something invigorating about starting an entirely new set. It’s similar to the feeling of starting a new book within a set, but bigger. It’s all shiny and new and you resolve to yourself that this time, it’ll be different and you’ll sit with your wiggly child and go over new Chinese characters with them.

Then reality settles in and after an obligatory session or two with your 5 year old, you go back to your delegating ways.

Oh, maybe that’s just me.

WHERE ARE WE?

We ended Week 8 on a high by finishing all the Treasure Box Set 3 books and I hoped to finish all the first book in Set 4 by the end of Week 10.

It seemed plausible. After all, Glow Worm (5) was progressing at a nice pace before, right?

DID WE DO IT?

NO!

I suppose I didn’t have to be so emphatic about it.

I just might be a smidge annoyed about losing my four week streak. But you know what? It happens.

WHAT HAPPENED?

I’m not quite sure other than it was life. I’m sure I just bailed on doing Sagebooks in Week 10 because I felt as if we were making good progress. We seemed to do so many lessons during Week 9 that I didn’t really stress about it the week after.

Then Week 10 happened and random things ate into my schedule and time and I used that as an excuse not to read Sagebooks with Glow Worm. Of course, he’s not going to remind me of my forgetfulness. He’s self-preserving that way.

WHAT ELSE?

Not really sure what to write here since by now, things are pretty much plug and play. Even when you’re not hitting the markers you want to hit, if you’re plugging away, it becomes pretty routine and normal.

I will say that because Glow Worm doesn’t read aloud to me as much as the older two kids, his pronunciation is not as precise. He also is still having a lot of trouble remembering characters from the previous sets. He doesn’t think about what he’s reading or look for contextual clues in the illustrations or sentence. This tells me he’s not paying attention to what he’s reading and is just trying to memorize and recall characters versus using the text to figure things out.

I have a feeling that this will not improve until I sit down with him more regularly and help him with context and ask him to think about what he’s reading instead of just try to recall words. After all, my hired help isn’t really qualified to do such. (It’s somewhat disappointing, really.)

So, know that there are consequences to delegating to less skilled children to do your teaching. But I think you would have guessed that to be the case anyway.

At any rate, here’s a video of Glow Worm reading Set 4 Book 1 Lesson 1.