I’m not really worried my 2 year old isn’t reading yet. I wasn’t expecting her to and haven’t done anything like YBR or Little Reader with her. I did have her watch meet the phonics at around 18 months. When I asked her to point to letters then she got them right but I haven’t really done much since and I am not sure she has them all down or not. She now is capable of verbalizing the sounds and I seen her verbalize them but she won’t do it if asked which doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t know them. I’m going to have her watch the phonics video again to make sure. I have started doing reading bear with her more regularly. I have done it with her sporadically before. I don’t think she is reading the words which is fine. I just don’t know if I should stick with the first 5 presentations or move through all of them when she can’t blend yet. She seems to watch through most of a presentation then gets bored towards the end and loses focus. With my oldest I moved on when she had a presentation down but that might take quite a while with my 2 year old and who knows when she will voluntarily let me know even if she does know. She won’t repeat the sounds to make a word but she will repeat the words but she isn’t blending them on her own. I know blending takes a while and I don’t know the best way to teach a 2 year old that skill. I am not worried just wondering what to do and which presentations to show her.
My 4 year old just learned how to blend and can do the first 5 presentations. I was pretty sporadic with reading bear with him and he finally is very consistent about sounding out the words. He has good phonemic awareness. He can rhyme, he knows first and last sounds and now he can blend. He still needs to blend out each word and I don’t think he is quite ready for easy reader books yet. I will be doing AAR with him but in a few lessons they will start passages from the readers and I don’t know that he can do that quite yet. He also has an articulation delay he is getting speech therapy for. I want to move through the rest of the presentations but he can’t pronounce digraphs or blends even though he can hear them and recognize them and make attempts at sounding them out. He picks up things pretty easily so I think he will do fine but I’m in that stage where he can sounds cvc words out but he is not ready to read them in sentences because he sounds out everything. What can I do with him so he can learn to blend faster without having to do each sound separately before he blends it into a word.
I bet you all feel better about the 2 year olds who not reading yet. You should hear how hard it was to teach my oldest who I started teaching at 5 because that is when I thought you were supposed to teach kids. lol
If your son knows the phonograms and is sounding out words, then he is able to read readers. What he lacks is fluency. That will come with lots and lots of reading - or saying the words when blended in Reading Bear. One thing I did with my oldest is have him find words on print. So if the word is cat - have him hunt for the word in a book or newspaper or anything else you can find. This is basically memorizing what the word looks like. That is what you do when you read. You don’t sound out every word, you brain just knows it. We sound out words we’ve never seen before or don’t have locked away in our brains. The other thing you can do is teach spelling at the same time. This is very helpful. I use phonogram tiles which I’ve attached. So if you are working on cat - then have him make the words: sat,mat, fat, rat, bat, hat, pat, vat. Let him discover how easy this is. Similarily, if working on cat you can then work on: cab, cad, cam, can, cap,
As far as your youngest who is just a few months younger than my son, I can tell you what we are doing. We are using LR and we did a little YBCR, we use Reading Bear and Starfall, and whatever he feels like. Including phonogram tiles. We showed the 1st five Reading Bear slides until my son knew then cold. Sometimes he’d get bored so we’d pick the the rest of the presentation later in the day. Part of the issue is not boredom, the have to process the information as well. So they have to turn their head away to keep from getting more input. When I have a headache or am working on a difficult mental activity, I shut out input. I lock myself in a quiet room, I tell my family not to disturb me. They are no different. In the beginning, my son would simply repeat the words after the he was given the work in the presentation. Then he could sound them out quickly. Sometimes now, the words don’t have to be sounded out. He just intuits the phonics. He is not reading books yet. Not because I am keeping them from him, he would rather be read to.
You will see below the post is a link to the phonogram tiles. Suggestion: when I did these the first time I laminated them and attached a small magnet.In the hands of a two year old, they won’t last long. The second time I made them I printed them on cardstock, used spray adhesive to attach the whole thing to a magnet sheet, then I laminated the top and cut. They are much more sturdy.
http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=9146
Thank you that was very helpful. I was thinking of doing spelling with my son too. It really helped things click with my oldest when I did a little spelling and all I had to do was teach her how to segment.
Part of the issue is not boredom, the have to process the information as well. So they have to turn their head away to keep from getting more input.
Oh wow I never thought of it like that but that is probably what she is doing. She does turn her head away.