Christopher started his lesson by completing the analysis of his dictation. He did a great job scooping the two syllable words into sentences. He was able to correctly mark up the closed vowel syllables and the vowel-consonant-e syllables. Christopher spelled all his sight words correctly. He worked on the analysis of the sentences. Today Christopher had every sentence starting with a capital letter. This was very good progress. Christopher circled all the sight words, he marked up all the words with one and two syllables, and he circled the punctuation. At the end of each sentence analysis, Christopher read the sentence back to me and then I had him spell the words: escape, springtime, and basement from memory. He did very well. Christopher read the story Limestone Cave. He read all the sight words first, correctly. He then read a paragraph silently. The story is about three children who decide to explore a cave. At first, when I asked Christopher what the children were planning to do, he told me they were going to play tag. We reread the first paragraphs and discovered that the children were going to explore a cave. Christopher did not have much background in the look inside a cave. We spent some time on background information by going to web sites with pictures of the insides of different caves. i explained to Christopher about the limestone formation of stalagmites and stalagtites in the cave. Christopher continued reading the story. He needed rereading to discover that the children took a flashlight to help them go through the cave. I asked Christopher why it says that they brought a rope for safety. He told me that they had to climb in the cave. We discussed the perils of falling into a small crevice in a cave. We talked about how to make a rescue in a cave. Finally, the story centered around the fact that there were bats in the cave. Christopher needed a quick background about bats. He had seen them on tv but he had never seen them in a zoo. We talked about their red eyes, how they look like birds, but they have fur instead of feathers. We talked about them being very ancient animals perhaps related to dinosaurs. Christopher seemed more interested after spending time exploring ideas. He worked on the consonants, vowels, and welded sounds for 4.2. We reviewed the guide words for the long vowel sounds of a, e, i, o, and u. Christopher read the review words: cute, shin, and dime from the magnetic tiles. He did not know what the shin bone meant. We looked up a diagram of a shin bone and added a definition and sentence to Christopher's dictionary. Christopher then read five nonsense words from the magnetic tiles. On the word "plobbile" we had to stop and review the long and short vowel in this word. Christopher will play a game next time to review the nonsense words.