Currently Wesley is sent home with Level H books for home reading, which is pretty age appropriate.
Wesley surprised me yesterday! I pulled out on of our Bellatrix Potter books “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”. With the intentions of reading it out loud to him. I had been reading about how important it is to read more classical stories to children that are above their grade level. I started reading it and about half way through he stopped me and told me it was his turn to read. He picked up the book and read the rest to me with about 85% accuracy. I was shocked, especially when I looked the book up after and realized it was at a grade3.5 level or Level L !! He is in grade 1.
We are on lesson 13 of the book “The Reading Lesson” http://www.readinglesson.com/TRLbook.html. He can read must of it quite easily, but we are working more on the phonic rules. I was getting frustrated for a while because I knew he knows how to read words with the silent e. But when there was just a list of words, it was like he was just trying too hard and kept messing them up. But when it was time to read the mini stories, they just rolled off his tongue with ease. I’m starting to think I we should read the pages with just words together and then he can read the stories on his own. What do you guys think? This way I can explain the rules to him, but focus more on input instead of output. Perhaps I’ll get further with him that way.
I’m so glad that I discovered early learning, even if he was already a preschooler. Anyone that is second thinking EL because their child is already 3,4,5 years old, just do it. Sure they might not learn as quickly as a 6 month old, but they will learn!
Sounds like he is doing great. A lot of reading in context is based on “guessing” - and not necessarily in a bad way - I find my own daughter uses a number of ways to work out a single word - she is clearly trying to sound them out as well as find what word works best in the sentence as well as taking in any picture clues if there are any and using sight words if she knows the word. This may be why your son reads better when reading in context than when he gets a whole list of words. If you are intent on him knowing the phonics rule then you should probably sit with him, explain the rule and sound out a good many of the words for him - maybe get him to sound out one or two on the list before letting him read the story, but not a whole long list. I taught my DD the silent E rule and never expected her to sound out more than 4 words per day from a list and this was for a child who enjoyed the sounding out. Glad the early learning has helped a lot!