Parent Tips: Practice 3.4.2

In Lesson 3.4.2, your child will be presented with an unfamiliar text and asked to use their new Level 2: Inspectional Reading and Level 3: Analytical Reading skills to parse it. We’ve chosen three texts from the real world, including excerpts from the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, a piece of legislation from the U.S. Congress, and a letter from someone famous. These first two texts will be in formats unfamiliar to most kids and may feel overwhelming to some kids.

If your child opens the text and instructions and does the “I give up” or “I don’t know what I’m looking at” body, encourage them to take a deep breath and focus on one step of the instructions at a time. If they still look panicked, do the first step out loud with them or encourage them to log into our Live Help hours.

We think of the experience of learning Inspectional and Analytical Reading as looking at an unfamiliar vegetable for the first time and having no idea how to prepare and cook the thing. You know it’s a vegetable and that it can be eaten, and you know how to eat vegetables in general, but this thing in front of you may as well be an alien artifact. We’re going to teach your kid how to understand and approach the vegetable—and that it’s unexpectedly delicious.