I have a young 5 year old daughter who started teaching herself to read at about 4 1/2. I went ahead and purchased Ordinary Parents’ Guide to Teaching Reading, about two weeks before Delightful Reading was introduced. 🙁 My daughter didn’t take to it at all, and stopped trying to read altogether. (I put it on the bookshelf, where I pull it out for my own reference only.) A few months later, she started again, and I’ve been sort of making it up as we go along. She loves to take her turn reading/sounding out new words while we’re reading books from the SCM/AO Early Years lists; she enjoys going through the 30 or so word wheels I found and gradually printed off from the internet; as she masters them, I print off a couple more and make them available. (They introduce word families (hop, mop, top, stop, crop, flop, etc.); we use magnetic letters and a white board to make words for each other to read. If she can sound it out and spell it for me to read off the board, I figure she has a good enough grasp on the word to read it. 😉 In addition to short vowel sounds, and letter blends (sh, ch, ck, etc.) I’ve been able to casually teach her the sounds for “ee” and “oo” and she can read words like steep, smoosh, tooth, etc. She also knows the “ay” family of word (say,stay, way, away, gray, may, play, etc.).
Now, however, she is stuck on transitioning to long vowel sounds. The “if … then” associated with changing the vowel sound when there’s a silent “e” at the end of the word seems just beyond her grasp. She gets so frustrated when she’s reading and runs into a word that uses this rule, because sounding it out doesn’t work. I have tried putting them next to each other on the white board, bit, bit, mop, mope, not, note, etc, but it isn’t clicking for her.
Does anyone have any suggestions? (I’m about ready to buy a whole curriculum to help me with this, which we really don’t have the money for, but given how smoothly this has gone so far, I really don’t want to have to do that.) And if the answer is to just back off and wait a few months to see if she gets it, do you have any ideas of how to pacify an eager 5-year-old in the meantime who’s eager to read on her own? (LOL)
Thanks!
April