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.

Reading

I received both of the books I ordered on "teaching kids to read". The first left me going ...meh, whatever. The other I really like. It has a horribly cheesy title, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". After reading all the forward information for parents, which took awhile because of numerous interruptions by both a three year old and her father, I was impressed. (The interruptions were fine. It just meant that I read the material in three sentence snippets.) We started today. She actually made it through most of the first lesson fairly quickly. We'll do two, ten minute sessions tomorrow.