Learning To Read

Ever since Abby asked me to teach her how to read this summer, I've been afraid she'd lose hope or get frustrated because, let's face it, learning to read can be a slow job (even for a very smart little girl!). First you have to learn to recognize all the letters... then all the sounds the letters make... then how to put the sounds together. She's really soldiered on, learning all the names of the letters, how to write upper/lower case letters, learning to write her name, etc. But for some reason, she really struggled with learning the sounds each letter makes. I don't know why - she didn't seem to be able to "hear" the difference, if you will. We'd work on her phonics workbook where she had to circle the things that started with "s", for instance, and this is how it went:

Me: "SSSSnake. Does that start with S?"
Abigail: "Ye-es?"
Me: "Very good! How about nnnnnut?"
Abigail: "Ye-es?"
Me: "Let's listen carefully. NNNNNNNNNut."
Abigail: "Ye-es?"
Me: "No, NNNNNNNNut starts with N. Hear it? N-nut. Ssss. Can you hear it?"
Abigail: "Yes!"
Me: "What about CCCCCCat? Does that start with S?"
Abigail: "Ye-es?"

Eventually I just decided that she obviously wasn't ready yet, and since I didn't want to turn the workbook into a "guessing game," I stuck it back on the shelf, waiting for another time.

We always play educational games while we're driving - even before she would talk to me I'd chatter on while we were driving, counting cars, talking about where trucks might be going, what colors the cars/signs/etc were, and so on. This is how she learned to count to 100 - every time we got in the car we'd count until we reached our destination. Last week I decided to introduce the idea of letter sounds in this way, and we started talking about things that start with the "ahh" sound.

To my surprise, she really seemed to understand the concept, and even came up with some "ahh" words herself! From then on, every time we got in the car we'd play the "letter sounds" game, naming as many words as we could think of for each letter, and so far it's been working.

So far we're up to K/L pretty dependably. I was thinking yesterday that if we finish off the letter sounds in the next couple of weeks, she could be "reading" small words by Christmas! :) I can't wait! Guess I'll have to start looking for some Bob Books for Christmas!