Phonics and the Alphabet

With every success, comes a sense knowing more than you really know.  With every failure, is the opportunity to actually know more.

With that said, I know more today than I knew a year ago.  Reading is easy to teach, as long as you do not make it painful. I do believe with all my hope that Susan wise Bauer (www.welltrainedmind.com) is right, that a toddler learning to identify cat and milk, can just as easily identify A and B if taught to do so.  Just as they learn cats goes meow and cows goes moo, they can learn A goes aaaa.

The eye opening thoughts of this, make me eager to prepare the 4 year old and the 2 year old.  I regret not having this thought years earlier with the other two older kids.

I am now treating reading, not as a subject to learn through the years of schooling, but as a life skill.  Just like learning to feed animals, making beds, and learning to talk.  We will now approach reading as a daily skill building experience and no longer as school.

One thing I have fallen in love with is the direct guide of reading, skill by skill that is provided with Fantastic Phonics.



We just started using the program and it is a hit.  The stories are a hit with the kids.  Quick and easy to print. Each skill building printable book comes with a lesson guide with added activities to reinforce the skills.
I am using this to polish and finish my 2nd grader's phonic skills.  I am at the beginning to help my 1st grader reinforce his use of phonics versus whole word habit.  I also started my 4 year old on it, but anticipate a very slow progress over the next 4-8 months.  By the way, our Bob books fit in really well with this.

To aid in the knowledge of names and sounds of the letters, I printed out several flashcards that I am going to put on a ring to travel around with us.  I am hoping to fortify the 4 year old's comprehension and also be able to begin building my 2 year old's vocabulary.

There are so many wonderful free sites out there.  Here are a few of my favorite.



These are 2in by 2in cards at mr printables.  I also printed the lower case.




I couldn't help but adore these from mr Printables, also.

Then because we just love the letter factory by leapfrog, I had to make these!


Huge thanks to Jessica at one shoe to she!

We will not be kicking off our first day of school until after Labor Day.  By then, we will have of curriculum posted.
~trish

For the Love of Phonics!

I am a firm believer of phonics versus sight words.  My general theory is phonics is a superior form of reading.  That was what I once believed and thought to be true.  Today, a new thought came to mind.  Some kids just can’t blend.

My dear son, is struggling and I am aware and assessing what can be done better. For background, the kid is a logical thinker with the ability to solve any puzzle.  Unfortunately, I think his speech is part of our problem.

Here we go, daughter number one took a month or two to understand how to bring the letter sounds together to make a word.  Since then, she has become a great reader and attempts to sound out most everything.

My son is not.  We are doing the Bob book methods and are at a snails pace.  I am very aware that we will be slow, slow for a while; then all of a sudden one day it will all just click.

Using the teaching with bob method, we have introduced a, m, t, and s.  We built at, mat, and sat. We read pages 1 and 2.  Mat. Mat sat.  Those three words were a chore.  So I set it all aside, keeping these little exercises to 10 minutes. 

Today, I was hoping for a little more.  We used the same letters, reviewed our at based words and built am and Sam. We reread pages 1 and 2, then added 3 and 4.  Sam. Sam sat. He was frustrated.

From these 2 days, this is what I now understand. My son cannot blend the sounds past 2 letters.  Hurray, he can read at, but that is it. It seems like he can’t hear the sounds to register the word that he is saying.  Now I really think this goes back to his speech. 

His articulation has more to do with knowing when to breath when he says each word, or he is taking breathes during the words.  So as he sounds the letters out, he takes breathes that then confuses his listening for the word.  Of course, this is my unprofessional, but practical assessment.

What’s a mom to do? Well, my first instinct is to throw this plan out the door and search the shelves for something new, but that would be ineffective.  I would spend every week and a half looking for something new.  My best bet is to tweak our method to teach phonics.  So this is what I am going to try:

1. I am throwing out the notion that we must sound out these words to read them and replacing it with a sight word memorizing method. yikes!

2. Introduce the root phonically.  Teach the word by sight and review the sounds in the word. So at, is sounded out.  Mat is sight with review of m-at. Do this for all the words, move on once all words in the book are known by sight. Mat, sat, Sam, and on.

Here is my hope, once we are a few books in, the sounding out notion will start to click in his mind.  Then once it clicks, we can go back and review the phonic structure of the word.

I also plan to use the tools by www.1plus1plus1equals1.com for learning sight words.  She has a great sight word program called You Can Read with printables (FOR FREE) that gives the kids a hands on approach to learning 4 sight words at a time. So I have them printed and will be introducing the 4 words from the Bob book and the words in set 1 (a, and, see, the).

I sure hope this works.  I just don’t want to burn him out on 4 words, just because he cannot blend or hear the sounds correctly. Please if you have any advise, I am all ears.  I truly think he will just be a slow to read kid like his parents, but I do not want him to lose his love of books because of it.  I also noticed, he does not have a good reading comprehension to retell a story after hearing it.  It seems as though he is a visual and hands on learner.

By the way, 1st grade daughter #1 is doing awesome.  I should do a post on how amazing she is doing.

~trish

Phonics – Bob Books – Just beginning

So, here we are already leaving our Phonics program to try something else.  So #2, Mr. Clown, is hard to deal with when it comes to reading out of a manual or workbook.  SO my dragging him through the mud with the Distar Reading program Teach your child to read in 100 lessons is not working!  It is not the method, it is the delivery.

So happy, I just came a cross Brandy at www.teachingwithbob.blogspot.com

She has lesson plans to progress your new to reading through the bob series with intentional reading.  We are going to start this next week.  She has phonics sounding, word building and reading at the first lesson.  She even helps you lay out a great notebook that can be your manual or just to record progress.

Being digital crazy as I am and looking for an excuse to use my laminator.  I decided to make cards that are just smaller than a baseball card, so when I laminate them, they will fit in baseball card sheets.  This way we can use the cards to make the words too.

Brandy lays out her method for getting started, here.

Lessons Day 1, 2, & 3

I hope this will be the nudge he needs to keep his interest.

~trish