Dialogue practice, Speech Dividends and an imaginary trip.

This week we continued with reading my abridged version of the "High School Musical" book. Tammy enjoys it, but even with the "easier" words and expressions, she still does not read as fluently as I have hoped she would. Comprehension is a little better though. I really want to get her to just read for the story's sake and enjoy it.

I have written down the dialogue between Troy and Gabriella (main characters in the movie) where they talk to each other after they have just met, and again after they have met again at the school. In between the two dialogues there is a short linking monologue by a nervous Gabriella expressing her fears and hopes for the new school.

The idea is that Tammy and her brother will perform this on her birthday party on the 21st. Tammy loves practising this little 3 min skit and she laughs at the jokes. Memorisation has really helped to improve fluency of speech and pronunciation. (She in inclined to say sh for s and s for sh e.g sour for shower and sho for so). We break up difficult words or phrases and keep on repeating them until she pronounces them correctly and says them fairly fluently.

The speech of last year is paying dividents: because we "drilled" the contents so that she could say it, she still remembers the facts and now we can continue with the same themes e.g. she said last year "We hope the new president (Obama) will sort out their (U.S.) money problems. " This week we reviewed our own government. We talked about how we have a parliament whereas the U.S. has a congress and how our ruling party (the A.N.C.) has more than 2/3 majority allowing them to pass just about any bill they want to, whereas Obama has to get the support from the opposition as well. She said she hoped he sorted out their money problems now and I could tell her that it is just what he trying to do this week. (We just fetched her friend from school and Tammy told her that it was the opening of parliament today - her "normal" Grade 4 friend did not know what parliament was...! Tammyexplained that that was the place where "the president stood in front and talked" and in reply to my "But why do they talk so much there?", she answered "They make laws." Very satisfactory. )

Tammy's dad went to Angola this week. We talked about trips, flights etc. I then let her calculate how long the flight would be (subtraction). (She struggles a bit with subtraction, but true to form, is working hard and showing progress. ) Then we planned an imaginary trip - she would like to go to Albuquerque (where High School Musical took place). With my help, she checked rates of flights, hotels and car hire on the internet. This led to subtraction: how much more would it cost to go in July than now? and mulitplication where the rates were given in $ instead of ZAR. We calculated that it would cost about R44 000 to fly there, stay in a hotel for 2 weeks and hire a car, but we have not calculated how much feeding ourselves or seeing sights would cost! This was a fun exercise and we'll definitely do something similar at least once a week... but then next week is Valentine's day and they are going away for the weekend, so we have only 4 days to make our valentines. Adele has suggested lavendar bags... hope it's not too late to get started!

Have a great week!