Blending letter sounds

Early Learning Teaching Your Child to Read
1

Hi everyone,

my son has learnt his letter sounds but blending sounds is just not ‘clicking’. I am probably not doing a very good job at that :frowning: I went through the previous posts and it seems like Hooked on phonics and My montessori house help. Should I buy both? Which of the Montessori house DVD’S are most helpful?

Thanks in advance,
Shaman

2

You could try using starfall.com with him. It’s free. They have lots of reading games. I think it helped my daughter some. She is still working out the finer points of blending and sounding out words too. But they do a much better job than me in dragging out the blended sounds. I was too choppy and repetitive myself, but I learned how to do it better from their website. I saying stuff like “ca-ca-ca-at cat.” Of course being a good little student she imitated my stutter exactly. I really just wanted to drag out the vowel sound to make sure she heard it - like this “caaat.” Starfall has lots of fun reading activities so it is just a nice addition to reading program. I used Hooked on Phonics with my son in kindergarten. I don’t think that it is interesting enough for a toddler. Although I had an older version so perhaps they have improved it.

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You could try starfall.com
Also my 4yr old has seemed to come up with a method of her own to help ‘hear’ those sounds. She taps her arm. For instance she is sounding out the word CAT.
She taps the top of her arm for the C sound and says (kuh) then taps the middle part of her arm for ( AAAA ) then the bottom part and says (TTT). She seems to hear the sounds that way versus just sounding out the words. You could just give it a try and see if it helps him or not too.

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Thanks Akalori and TracyR4. I had seen the starfall website earlier when someone had recommended it but never went through it completely. I think it will definitely help us. I just have to find a way to be able to win the ‘mouse control’ thing with my son :slight_smile:

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