Our homework

For our Easter homework, Eduardo asked us to read a book and write a short précis. The obvious choice were the books we'd been given at the end of the Autumn term 2005; mine was “Los tigres del valle” by Jordi Sierra and Pam’s, “El Muñeco que anunció la Navidad” by Jesús Ballaz. Both were described as being suitable for nine year olds and were way beyond our comprehension at that time.

Even now, after three years of Spanish lessons, we are struggling to read those two books. To be fair, the authors use a lot of verbs in the various forms of the past tense and a great deal of vocabulary that we just haven’t come across. To make any sense of them, we would need to sit down with the books and a dictionary and go through them page by page. With 101 pages in my book and 72 in Pam’s that is more of a task than we have time for.

Our only recourse was to go down to the library and find something simpler. We started with the books for pre-school infants. They were easy to read, even with our limited Spanish but contained so few words that producing a précis would have literally meant re-writing the whole story. We moved on to the books for five year olds. These had a bit more meat to them and were still readable with the exception of the odd word. Feeling brave, we looked at the six year old section and were pleasantly surprised to find we could still largely understand the text.

If Eduardo is expecting us to come back with a resume of War and Peace, then he is in for a shock. I’m sure our final choice will amuse him. Isn’t it sad though, at 60+ we find ourselves with a reading age of 6.