Hi all!
I would like to tell you our early learning story and ask for some ideas to continue from now on.
It’s been a year since we started our early learning adventure. We started with Doman flash cards at 15 - 18 months (not too successful for us, by the way!). After that we did Little Reader, which was much more fun. At the beginning she loved it, then she slowly lost interest. She never read any words by the whole word method, but she learnt lots of new vocabulary (animals, furniture, etc). We almost finished the first semester, then gradually stopped showing it (I didn’t see the point in showing it to her if she didn’t want to! I decided I’d rather wait until she became interested again).
In the meanwhile, I taught her the letters by their sound, not their name. By the way, I teach my daughter Spanish as this is my mother language. Spanish is -unlike English- extremely easy to read by the phonics method, because letters are pronounced always the same. After some time she was able to recognize each letter in a word, but it didn’t make any sense to her. She would read f. e. A, N, N, A but she didn’t really connect those letters with the word Anna.
A couple of months ago she started blending simple consonants and vowels (I think it’s called blend?), like this: B + A = BA, B + E = BE and so on…
And now, not long ago, she started reading short 3-letter words (pan, sol…). She sometimes asks me to read her a word, and then tries to do it herself. But she really struggles with longer words. It’s like she forgets the first syllable after decoding the first one. For example she will start to read “Dora”. Then she says “d, o, DO”. Then “r, a: RA” Then I ask her: so what’s the word? And many times she doesn’t know any more! She just remembers the last syllable.
I’m wondering whether she’s too young for the phonics method and she simply is not physically able to remember those syllables at all? (She’s only 2,5 years old). What do you think? It also seems quite a lot of work -and slow!- to read each word by the sound of each letter (when I was little we learnt the syllables as a whole, as in ma-me-mi-mo-mu, not each sound separately).
Anyways, she seems really interested in decoding printed words when she sees them (car brands, words on everyday items and so on) and I would like to help her to continue learning but at her pace and in an enjoyable way.
What do you think? Should I encourage her to go on “decoding” words by sounding each letter separately? Or should I change my approach? I wish she had interested in the whole word method but she never remembers any sight words.
Any suggestions will be welcome!