Kindergarten Suggestions

I have been thinking about Kindergarten a fair amount lately. With my Dd I used the Phonics Museum kit from Veritas Press. I was wooed by its beauty, fine art cards, intelligent custom readers (which had an eradic progression about them), and the D’Nealian font used in the worksheets. Let me tell you, that K workbook is the mother load of K workbooks. I look at it and cringe for what I put my daughter through; and in the end gave her very little retention. What!? hundreds of worksheets didn’t pan out?! Shocker.

Ding-ding, round 2, DS had the Explode the Code experience with a little Fun Family Phonics mixed in. His stick and ball printing is STILL poor to this day, and no amount of A Reason For Handwriting has aided that. At age 10 now, he will be trying his hand at D’Nealian (or Modern Manuscript it is sometimes called) to try to retrain his motor skills there.  He was even more difficult to teach reading to, he struggled for years. Until we got through the Explode the Code books that introduce more of the double letter to quadruple letter phonograms. Interesting. It took me years to see that he just didn’t have the phonograms he needed from the start to really unlock reading. And, once I got him going in copywork, narrations, and dictation, he really hadn’t budged much in language arts skills at all. Soon after starting copywork, he stopped asking me how to spell simple common words.

I guess what I am saying is, Charlotte knew what she was doing. I, did not. Round 3 is about to begin and I would like to learn from my first 2 experiences. I read a blog post from a blog linked through the comments on Sonya’s blog post titled Alphabet Fun: Teaching Reading comments:

commenter’s blog post list

(read this post first)

I will read a bit more there. But I think I will use a resource I have that she mentions Spell to Write and Read, to teach the 70-ish phonograms to him within a few months and leave it there, and just continue on with a more CM focus. I bet that is what delightful Reading does, gives them all the phonograms, I will have to give it a serious look at too. I all ready know from experience, the natural progression of oral narrations through to written narrations later grades really does make a good writer and thinker out of a child. I trust that. I just need to plant the right seeds to start out now.

So there is my thought process thus far on K. I hope someone will chime in on delightful reading experience here for us. I hope you will post what you end up doing.