Rudy News

I just realized this morning, that I've been meeting with my learner, Rudy, for more than 3 months now, and have yet to update how he's doing.
It has been a long few months! We got along really well, right from the start. I was really impressed with his dedication to improving his reading and really excited to be a part of his journey. But the program starts off slow and after a few weeks, Rudy started to try to take over. "I just want to read today." Most of the time, he'd concede and let me teach him a small lesson. But for someone who reads at a 4th grade level, I can understand that learning the letters over again would be kind of boring. Sometimes I would concede and we would just read aloud (or actually, he'd read aloud and I would sit there, bored, and correcting his pronunciation).
Occasionally, it would come up that I would think of something brilliant to teach him to go along with the phonics lesson. Punctuation, Homophones, Paragraph Structure... Little blips of something I'd learned long ago would come into mind and I'd pass it along. I can tell when what we're learning is really interesting to him.
So, more than halfway through the initial six month contract we'd signed, we're still working out the kinks. I do believe that Rudy is becoming a stronger learner, but we still have a long way to go.