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Should I be worried if after a whole year of reading aloud the Thornton Burgess books to my son, he still did not comprehend the reading? We struggled with this portion of the plans all year long. After listening to me read the assigned selections, my son was never able to answer any of the questions I would ask about the reading. I began to get worried and about mid school year and decided to test him with another book after school was done. I read to him on of the Junie B. Jones books (omitting the bad words) and he was able to answer all of my questions correct.y and even narrate to me what had occurred in any given chapter. The Junie B. books are written in much simpler language, but i just wanted to make sure he was not having a hard time just listening. To test him further I read to him the first book of the Boxcar Children Series and again he was able to comprehend the material. I stuck with the Thornton Burgess Books all year with much struggle because I did not want to give up on him and yet he never caught on. Where did I go wrong, or is there something I am missing? Now I worry that the book selections for Beyond will be way over his head. I don't want him to read-alouds. Did anyone else have the same issues and if you did, how did you overcome them?

First, I am glad you chose to continue reading the Burgess books, and I bet more progress was taking place than may be readily seen. Take heart! The Thorton Burgess books look simple because the chapters are short, but they are more difficult than one would first think. They are extremely well-written (Burgess used to be a newspaper columnist as well as an author I believe). Often times living books have a more classic sounding feel to them. This can take several years for dc to get used to, as the simple/short sentence/very little plot/somewhat dumbed down books being turned out in droves today lack that prose with words, and make comprehension a no-brainer. We have some books like that on our shelves too, but I'm trying to slowly weed them out - though there's no real harm in them, there's no real learning in them either. I just want to encourage you that I think any child would be able to answer questions about Junie B. Jones more easily than Thorton Burgess. For next year, you may want to choose Beyond's Boy Interest books as they are living books, but don't have as much of a class-sounding feel to them as the Classics Set does. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie

The Beyond books should work better IMO they are not too advanced.

My kids don't like the Burgess books either.

My China Girl listened to these when she was still acquiring the english language. I didn't dumb down the books but did ask her to stop me when she didn't understand. which was often, I also acted lots of stuff out. and often just explained as I went along I sounded like this "he accorded it to his score... that means he gave himself a point. In the game." (I just made that up, but you get the idea) I found I had to do again this year with her history book. It is written using words not in our every day lexicon. But this is her 3rd year here and many people are flabbergasted by her range of vocabulary. So I know it is working.

I have to think on the fly and keep adding in explanatory bits but I can see it really helps her understand. As we went along I could see she didn't need me to Keep repeating words and she did get the hang of Thorton Burgess. And was ecstatic to receive the skunk book for her birthday. She loves all the animal characters.