Week 1 of Learning to Read

It was a mixed week in many ways.  She clearly started grasping the idea that letter sounds merge to form words and was gleeful when she could "say fast" the slow "sounded out" versions of words.  She seemed surprised the first time the sounds went from being sounds, to a word she knew.  I like the approach of the book we're using.  They view reading as decoding.  The child decodes a set of letters to a sound (word).  Then, the question is whether or not they actually have that word in their vocabulary.  What we're finding is that Rachel's vocabulary is huge.  She has surprised me in the last couple of weeks by knowing words that I don't have a clue where she picked up.

However, she still has pronunciation struggles, which lead her to not want to do the lessons since they have sounds in them that she can't do easily.  I started getting lots of push-back by lesson six, so I think we're going to wait six months and then try again.  If the "f" and "th" sounds don't improve, we'll revisit the speech therapist.

Chapter Book Introduction

Today, I purchased "Dinosaurs Before Dark", the first book in the Magic Treehouse Series.  I thought we might try reading a chapter or maybe two.

We read the entire book. In fact, Rachel and I read over 5000 words today.  She LOVED the book.

She has also taken to her "Reading Lessons".  Twice today I found her opening one of my books, moving her finger around on the page, making the sounds we had been working on and pretending to read.

She actually asked to do more lessons, but I moved her on to something else.  I want to leave her wanting to do more tomorrow.