When I began teaching her to read at the age of 3. I began with 100 Easy Lessons( phonics based) with her and it just was not clicking with her at all and the progress was painfully slow. She just wanted to read and read now! :rolleyes:
So that is when I caved in and got the Your Baby Can Read for her she had been wanting it ever since she saw the commercial on t.v when she was 3. She’d tell me " Mommy, I want that, I want to Read." So this seems to be working for her very well right now.
Would adding phonics at the same time confuse her?
She is in the 2nd YBCR DVD right now, and reads, and recognizes anywhere( in books signs etc) 33 words so far and that’s in 3 weeks time.
Or should I wait a bit and get her up and reading before introducing phonics? I’m not sure what to do really. I don’t want to confuse her either.
I would follow her lead. She is showing you how easily she learns from DVDs. You will not confuse her by introducing phonics, personally I think one can help the progress of the other and they work well combined (whole word & phonics).
Does she know her letter sounds yet? If not, go get the Leapfrog Letter factory DVD asap. If you buy certain kits online, they come with flashcards, if not, download some here. I cut the blog address off the bottom of all of them.
http://projectsbyjess.blogspot.com/2010/09/leap-frog-letter-factory-flash-cards.html
After she masters that, move on to the Leapfrog Talking Word Factory.
I recently posted a download for the letter factory coloring sheets as well on the leapfrog website in the reading forum I think.
Yes, she knows all of her letter sounds. I have the Leap Pad videos. Bought those when they first came out. They are awesome. She’s known her letters and their sounds since she was about 2.5
So I had figured we could start out with phonics but for some reason the concept wasn’t clicking with her. She was just sounding out the letters and not putting the sounds together. Not sure why. But the YBCR DVD’s are working so much better for her.
Okay, the other videos that do a nice job of teaching word blending are My Montessori House. I think “Make Big Words” is the first in the series for word blending. It’s just a conceptual thing, learning how to put the letters together. I would consider getting that and playing it a lot. You might be up against her being bored by it though because the animations are more basic versus a fast paced cartoon and she is a little older, but it presents how to sound out letters into words in a very user friendly way IMO. This video is what worked for my DD is a few short weeks. Once it “clicks” I think she’ll be off and running.
Have you considered DadDude’s FleschCards too?
After you’re through with YBCR, you might want to consider YCCR where they introduce phonics and combine it with the whole word approach. It is also much more fun and has more catchy songs, rhymes, and games. My daughter loved it!
Hello Tracy, what you are describing is very similar to the situation with my daughter. YBCR was a great success with her and she seems to be very comfortable with the whole-word approach. I then decided to introduce phonics and started her on DadDude’s (Larry Sanger) Fleschcards, but with not much success yet. For the time that she was interested in these (she is not too keen on cards), she did not manage to successfully blend the letters. Although she knows what each letter “says”, she would end up blending it into something else. Interestingly, if I teach her similar looking CVC words using a whole-word approach (toy/boy, cat/hat, has/had), she does not seem to struggle to differentiate. I have to mentioned that her speech is delayed, which may be one of the reasons for this difficulty.
I am planning to persevere with phonics and hopefully it will click one day. I also keep showing her the LeapFrog and Montessori videos as recommended by TMT.
And by reading your other thread just now, I think I originally misunderstood you. So she knows how to sound out words, she just sounds out every single word every single time?
I’ve never heard of the Dad Dude Cards. I’ll have to look into those.
She can sound some words out. But it was this pain staking process of ccc,aaa,tttt… so what is the word? ccccc.aaaa…ttt.
The 100 EZ lessons does show how to sound out the word then say the word. It just was not clicking at all.
She will also sound out a word and get a totally different word out of it. Like she doesn’t hear it. ( she doesn’t have hearing problems)
Very much the same way one other poster mentioned.
I’m thinking the whole word method might make more sense to her at the moment because she seems to do really well with it.
One thing I found interesting is two out of my four children have speech problems ( daughters number 2 and 3) and they learned to read phonetically. My two that have no speech problems needed the whole word approach. Which #2 and 3 daughters’ speech therapist found to be extremely interesting. As usually children with speech issues have difficulty with teaching to read this way.
Maggie(my 4yr old ) doesn’t have speech issues thankfully. She’s got enough physical health problems to contend with though , but speech and hearing aren’t one of them , thank goodness.
I read there is a link between the child’s learning style and how easily s/he takes to phonics. Apparently many visual-spatial learners are much more comfortable using a whole-word approach and struggle to read phonetically.