Hi,
It’s been a while since my last update, but I wanted to share our progress.
My boy never really took to whole word identification of words through Little Reader, but he learned his alphabet pretty young (around 14 months), using Leap Frog’s Letter Factory DVD and a set of those jumbo foam letters for the bath, and so we naturally focused on phonics instead. When he was in his alphabet learning phase, he was completely obsessed, playing with, arranging, stacking, sounding out and handling his foam letters daily.
This is not to say that Little Reader isn’t amazing, because it is. Our boy has an awesome vocabulary in general, and I attribute that to LR. We still use it for English and Russian vocabulary comprehension.
Since learning his alphabet he’s been reinforcing the letters for a solid year just by identifying them wherever they happen to be in real life and also through the materials on starfall.com. We slowly but surely try to use the more advanced features on starfall.com too as we feel ready.
He’s at the point now where he can very easily pronounce 3 letter words if we slowly sound out each letter together.
For example, I will see a word in a book, like “big”. If I sound out each letter, he’ll tell me the word with no problem.
If I ask him to sound out each letter instead, he’s not usually successful, but will sometimes string the word together.
Sometimes we share the task, with me sounding out the first two letters, and him sounding out the last letter, and then he’ll pronounce the word.
Even if the actual word doesn’t sound like the letters sounded out individually, he will usually tell me what the word is, which is surprising to me.
I also started using his easel to write 3 letter words, and to get him used to the idea that writing is a form of expression.
So, if he’s missing papa, or hungry, I’ll write those words on his easel to get him used to that idea.
What’s fascinating also is how much he likes to just guess words based on context if we are reading, which I think is a fine skill too.
He’s learning to comprehend pictures and scenarios, and tries to guess at what is written based on the illustrations.
At this point, we’re actively printing and laminating Flesch Cards and planning on using them daily in the coming weeks. So far, we only printed and laminated the first two pages from the first set, and our boy has most of those memorized (or read?) now. We resisted with the Flesch cards up till now because our boy didn’t like using them. He was pretty resistant.
At this point, I feel like the big challenges are around a sense of purpose. Our boy is getting into the plots of longer books and is developing a rich imagination, and it’s almost like he doesn’t want to slow down to continue to learn to read. It’s hard to explain to him the purpose of learning to read at this point when mom or dad can read the book so much better and faster. He plays along with pronouncing words as I sound them out, but quickly gets impatient as he wants to get on with the story.
Anyway, lots of progress!
mom2ross
