Help, from seasoned CM moms, please…

Hi Tiffany! You will probably get quite varied answers to this question. I’ll share some of what I’ve done over the years. I am currently teaching children #5 and #6 to read (one is 7, turning 8 this month, the other is 6). I’ll get to those, but let me share about each child in order.

Child #1 – we focused on learning letter sounds with a ‘letter of the week’ starting around age 3.5. Really, it was just a way for me to choose a theme each week for books to look at together and things to learn about. So if it was letter F week we might focus on frogs, fish, flowers, etc and our library book basket would be filled with things beginning with that letter. We would practice the sound, as well as any other letter sounds she had learned. After doing all the letters we started on consonant teams, vowel teams, etc. She made the leap to chapter books around age 6.5. No formal curriculum along the way.

Child #2 – He had zero interest in learning what sound each letter says until he was about 6. So we just waited. Around 6 we began daily phonic practice, short but consistent. He read his first chapter book around age 8.5.

Child #3 – She was learning her letter sounds along with Child #2. She is just a year younger than him and so when she started she was 5 and she moved to chapter books the same time he did, so she was 7.5.  Again, no formal curriculum. We tried a few different things here and there with these two but basic phonics was best.

Child #4 – He is 2 years younger than Child #3. He taught himself to read chapter books completely on his own at age 3.5. He walked up to me one day and just started reading a book to me. This was 6 months before the two kids just older than him started learning their first letter sounds. (See what I mean about every child is different?)

Child #5 – When he was ready to learn to read I had 8 children and was pregnant with #9. I decided to invest in All About Reading so I could literally open it and not have to think about what to teach next. I like the activity pages, we keep them in a notebook so he could pull them out to do over and over. We didn’t worry about doing 1 lesson per week, just moved ahead when he grasped a concept and hung out for weeks when he didn’t. He is halfway through AAR2. We put it on hold January 1st so he could spend a month reading aloud to me from ‘regular books’ like Green Eggs and Ham, Little Bear, and Frog and Toad. Here we are February 10th and he’s still just reading aloud to me and has progressed so far. He’s picked up a lot of vowel teams that he hasn’t learned yet with AAR. I think of ARR as a tool to keep us moving forward until they can read from more books, like the pathway readers. If you like those then enjoy them!

Child #6 – He is 6 years old and spend the fall learning what each letter says. In January he decided he could read CVC words so he just started. We pulled out AAR1 about 2 weeks ago but haven’t used the lessons, just the activity pages from when his brother used it. He picks one each day and reads the words/does the activity. I need to flip through the book and decide what lesson to jump to for him. 😉

Child #7 just turned 5 last month. He knows some of his letter sounds and has started asking to learn to read, so I will be offering some letter sound games soon.

Child #8 is 3 years old and knows almost all the letter sounds already. I’m ignoring it until he asks for reading lessons. LOL. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he will teach himself like child #4 did. Who knows?

Child #9 is just a year old. We have just convinced him that books are for looking at and not eating.

For spelling, SCM recommends copywork for grades 1-2, and starting SW for grade three.  Using Language Well gives some gentle grammar lessons alongside SW.   I have three children using SW and they’ve done very well with it.  We all greatly prefer it over traditional spelling workbooks.  My oldest is a natural speller, and the next two oldest are not.  I saw wonderful improvements with my 2nd oldest, and I’m confident my 3rd child will also improve with a bit more time.

Tristan, what do you use for a “formal” spelling program?  I’ve been doing copywork/dictation with my 5th grader, and he is not naturally learning to spell.

I used AAR 1 almost all the way through and did not really like the stories. We also had gone a not too fast. I thought about repeating it but like I said I didn’t love the stories and D’s hated the fluency sheets. I really liked the Christian Light readers so I decided to have ds read them. I also got the tracts manual and light units. I did not use the first 3 light units at all. We just read a story and did phrase cards and word cards. I had really liked AAR’s word cards and methods though. So I did the lesson more like an AAR lesson with phonogram and word card review. I made my own word cards using their list in the teachers book and adding in more phonetic words that used all known sounds. A good source for these is the bookmarks in the light units and The ABCs and all their tricks. We don’t try to do a whole lesson in a day spending 2-4 days on a lesson going on when ds can read the stories with at least some fluency. I also never do all the busy work in the light unit but the bookmarks are not overwhelming to him and we use these like fluency sheets along with the phrase cards.

Just the other day he commented on how nice the little girl in his story was:)