I think we are there! Reading!

[Mela_Bala]

m_rouge23,

You are very welcome I love to hear about the first signs of reading. It is such an amazing feeling and everytime I hear of someone it reminds me of the first time I realized my son could read. I am going to encourage you to start teaching phonics by letter sounds and then blends and digraphs. They are the bricks in the bridge of my son reading whole words to reading phonetically at 17 months. You can start by watching some youtube videos of phonic rhymes to get examples and then sing the rhyme of one letter for a couple days throughout the day before moving on to the next letter. My son learned the blends and digraphs from the preschool prep phonic dvds. Of course there are many toys that teach phonics we used some from LeapFrog like their laptop and fridge magnets. If you have an ipad or app device there are soooooo many apps out there and alot are free. I try to limit my son on the ipad so the only phonic app he used was the first in the series of ABC Magic and it was free.
There is a wonderful program created by DadDude (forum member) www.readingbear.org which I highly recommend. It was within the first two weeks of showing my son his lessons on a consistent basis when he started reading phonetically.

[m_rogue23]

@Mela Bala post:21

m_rouge23,

You are very welcome I love to hear about the first signs of reading. It is such an amazing feeling and everytime I hear of someone it reminds me of the first time I realized my son could read. I am going to encourage you to start teaching phonics by letter sounds and then blends and digraphs. They are the bricks in the bridge of my son reading whole words to reading phonetically at 17 months. You can start by watching some youtube videos of phonic rhymes to get examples and then sing the rhyme of one letter for a couple days throughout the day before moving on to the next letter. My son learned the blends and digraphs from the preschool prep phonic dvds. Of course there are many toys that teach phonics we used some from LeapFrog like their laptop and fridge magnets. If you have an ipad or app device there are soooooo many apps out there and alot are free. I try to limit my son on the ipad so the only phonic app he used was the first in the series of ABC Magic and it was free.
There is a wonderful program created by DadDude (forum member) www.readingbear.org which I highly recommend. It was within the first two weeks of showing my son his lessons on a consistent basis when he started reading phonetically.

This is my first time to know about blends and digraphs in teaching phonics. What exactly are these?

[Mela_Bala]

Hi so sorry I didn’t explain more earlier.
A blend is a consonant cluster, like “bl”, “cr”, “fl”, “sk”, and “tw”. Both letter sounds are pronounced.

A digraph is two consonants which together make a new sound different from the two consonants that make it up. “ch”, “sh”, “ph”

Here is a website I just pulled up with a lot of examples and it looks like they have worksheets we can print without having to pay their membership fee
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/consonantblends/

I also found an app the other day called phonics genius by alligator apps. They also had apps for sight words and fry words all 3 were free.

BrillKids also has a phonic flip chart that my son carriers around everywhere. We got it when we upgraded to the new little reader deluxe package.