I just wanted to share my joy here. I have been teaching my little one to read since she was a baby, but I have done many things wrong and many things right. I won’t get into that in this post. Anyway, she loves to read and daily is reading to herself. I hear her sitting at the couch or the table reading and it just pleases me so much that she likes to read as much as she does.
Yesterday she was reading Millions of Cats. I was working at my desk but heard her and got my video camera out to capture the moment. Today she was reading to her dad while I was working at my desk. She was reading That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown. My husband commented on how cute she is and how well she pronounces all the big words while she is reading.
I decided to get on www.arbookfind.com to see if I could determine the reading level of these books and am shocked to see that they are both 4th grade reading level books. I am thrilled, excited and pleased with her and I just felt compelled to share here with all my friends. We just finished reading Stuart Little and she would often grab the book and read as much as she could. It is so wonderful to see that she is fearless in her reading. She doesn’t hesitate to read long books or pages full of text. So for all of you who know what it feels like, share in our joy and all you who are on your way, keep on, it is so wonderful to arrive and have raised kids who love to read.
You can see her reading here although these are months old and her reading improves everyday.
Great job. Your daughter reads fluently with ease. I really enjoyed the videos. I’m going to try the arbookfind site to get my daughter’s reading level too. Mine is about a month younger than her. Your daughter is reading a bit better. I didn’t teach any phonics. She worked most of it out herself but I think I’m going to do some formal phonics reinforcement once my 8 yr old son goes back to school next week. It’s hard getting her to concentrate when they are together. Did you do any formal phonics training too? I watched two of your videos. I’m planning to watch more of them tonight once the kids are in bed. It is so interesting to watch the reading progression. Your daughter reads with emotion - I love that! It shows that she has deep comprehension, involvement, and enjoyment of the text. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks for your comments. I need to post some current video of her. She was reading with a lot of expression today. It is so cute.
We did sight words for the first year and a half with flash cards. I did show her some Flesch Cards when she was under 2, but I was not extremely consistent with her. Our breakthrough came last year when we played a word matching game. She really liked that and learned the words so quickly. Then I started showing her sight words about 2 times per day. I would flash about 20 words at a time, in less than 30 seconds and she knew them by the end of the week. I can’t praise flash cards enough. They are magical; working quickly and effectively. We do have the Adventure in Phonics Workbook from Christian Liberty Press. I love this series. We are currently on Level C, which is the 2nd grade level. Reading, reading and more reading while text pointing has also played a huge part in her progress. We do not have formal reading instruction, she reads whenever she wants to and I don’t require her to read anything for school. I keep a lot of books around the house for her and she reads what she likes. The really neat thing is that she is a good speller as well. She is really progressing in this area and I am very excited about it. She officially started 1st grade in our homeschool a few weeks ago. She has had 2 Spelling Tests so far and she has gotten 100% on both.
I have been a huge advocate of early learning for a long time, but it is just so neat to see these big breakthroughs. It is part of why we do it, right? One of the mistakes I think I made was trying to do phonics too early. If I could go back and do it again I would build a really strong sight word foundation before moving on to phonics. That is a big part of them learning phonics anyway. They learn by seeing how the letters behave in words. I believe in phonics, obviously, because we are learning it, but I wouldn’t not push it until we had many months of consistent sight reading underway.
We actually were developing the MonkiSee products before I had her so she saw plenty of the videos and flash cards and I made some of my own phonics cards with word families where I would write the first letter in black and the word family in red. I would have cat, bat, rat, sat and so forth. I printed out at least 13 sets of Daddude’s Flesch cards and showed her those. I still have a basket of them here that she pulls out from time to time and asks me to show her. Our breakthrough came when she was about 3 1/2, a year ago. I remember we had a lot of discussions about phonics and sight reading with Daddude and other members on the Yahoo group and I admit it, I was swayed and really tried to focus on that for a time. When I went back to flash cards and was consistent and showed them regularly she became a reader. I have used LR a little bit as well. It is a wonderful program. I think for us, the flash cards are what brought us to a new level and from there she just jumped in. She likes me to read to her, but more often than not, she grabs the book and says she is reading to me. She is very independent and likes to do things without help. That may be evident in some of the videos of her. She doesn’t like me to point to the words or touch the book and so forth. She has the attitude that, “Mommy, I can do it.”
I am so happy she is reading well, but more than that, I am so happy that she loves to read. I decided when she was 2 that regardless of her being able to read early or not, I would read to her and develop that love. I pointed to the text while I read, which I think helps a lot, too. We visit the library about twice a week and usually have 80 books checked out on any given day.
I believe it is being consistant in whatever you do. My son read much earlier than she did and I did comparing between them, I admit it. We are blessed that there are so many great products available to us as parents now. When I began this journey 10 years ago there was only Doman and I spent months of my life making flash cards, books, Bits of Intelligence cards and videos. Now we have YBCR, LR, MonkiSee, soon Reading Bear and others. It is wonderful to have access to all these products as they give us options in how we can teach.
