After spending four weeks on phonemic awareness type activities (rhyming, syllables, counting sounds in words, beginning/ending sounds) I began reading instruction with Bo last week.
Bo's background was fairly strong in letter and sound recognition. He had picked this information up effortlessly during reading and asking me what certain letters were. We did make an alphabet book earlier this year when he was really asking to do some school work. This was my effort at holding him off a little longer on any formal instruction.
So, after feeling he had pre-reading skills in place we jumped into reading as outlined in Home Education on pages 217-222. This was a new concept for me because of my background in education. I was used to teaching one or two sight words per week along with one word family.
Teaching the way CM recommends in Home Education gives the child a much larger reading vocabulary after the first week of instruction.
In a nutshell, I taught reading by sight the first day, using the first page of The Little Red Hen. The next day we worked with word families with some of the words we had learned.
Here is our first reading lesson in pictures:
Bo's background was fairly strong in letter and sound recognition. He had picked this information up effortlessly during reading and asking me what certain letters were. We did make an alphabet book earlier this year when he was really asking to do some school work. This was my effort at holding him off a little longer on any formal instruction.
So, after feeling he had pre-reading skills in place we jumped into reading as outlined in Home Education on pages 217-222. This was a new concept for me because of my background in education. I was used to teaching one or two sight words per week along with one word family.
Teaching the way CM recommends in Home Education gives the child a much larger reading vocabulary after the first week of instruction.
In a nutshell, I taught reading by sight the first day, using the first page of The Little Red Hen. The next day we worked with word families with some of the words we had learned.
Here is our first reading lesson in pictures:
Here I introduced the new word. He was studying the word so he could make a picture of the word in his mind.
The next step was for Bo to remember the word from the picture he had in his mind and use the letter tiles to spell the word. (the picture is of the word red, I forgot to take one with the)
After spelling the word with the letter tiles, Bo looked through the word cards and found the word.
The last step was to look through the page of words and locate the word in the story.I was very pleased with Bo's progress. There are a few considerations I need to make for next time.
*The lesson was too long. We learned eleven words the first day. I considered stopping halfway through, but he was very eager to read the page when we were finished so I continued. He was so very proud at the end of the lesson. He was able to read the first page of the story.
*I might consider omitting either finding the word from the word cards or finding it in the story. It seems a bit repetitive.
*This story was new to Bo, he had not heard it before.
coming soon...
our word family lesson
Holli
