Insidious Troubles

I was working until after 5pm in the basement today. When I came upstairs, I knew something was wrong. The dishes were piled up in the sink. Little Kat is supposed to wash the dishes as soon as he gets home. He gets home by 3pm every day. Then I checked the other tasks Little Kat is supposed to accomplish on his return home from school. Laundry was not done. Fail. Little Kat did say that he read his book for 20 minutes.

I got ahold of Little Kat's Kindle reader. He said he polished off three pages from the book. I read over the pages quickly. Then I spotted the word "insidious" in the text. When asked, Little Kat had no idea what that meant. I had him look up the definition in the dictionary. That turned out badly. The definition started out with "processing in a subtle way". Little Kat did not pronounce "processing" or "subtle" correctly. Oh boy.

I had Little Kat keep looking up the definitions of words. But the definitions contained words that Little Kat did not understand or pronounce. This included words such as delicate, treacherous, and deception. Eventually Little Kat was able to determine what insidious meant.

It is good if Little Kat does not understand some words from his book. That means he is trying to read a book at or above his reading level. However he can't just skip over the words in question. He needs to research them in the dictionary. Of course that will require some oversight to ensure he does the work. Yay. More work for me.