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Reading help — long vowel sounds
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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
I would teach it to her as a rule. “When there are two vowels in a word, the first one says its name and the second is silent.” (ALMOST always…always have to give that caveat lol)
Once she understands it as a rule, you can help her look carefully at the words. I found that my kids would start to read it as a short vowel, see the second vowel, then backtrack and re-do it.
Sometimes it can help to have them actually cross out the second vowel and draw a stick over the first vowel to give them a visual. Not all kids needs this step, but some do.
Beyond that, it just takes practice. HTH! 🙂
Starfall is a wonderful free resource. She would probably enjoy going through the Level 2 “Learn to Read” stories and activities. I see that the 6th row deals with the vowel, constant, e words.
My children have enjoyed reading with me along side them. Anytime they came to a word that they could not figure out I would start saying the couple of sounds (or whole word) until they figured it out.If the word had a rule that we had worked on then I would remind them of the rule. Often they could figure out the word form that and if not, I would sound it out for them. Making it low stress and an enjoyable experience is most important. I fretted quite a bit over my oldest. It made him very resistant to learning to read. He dreaded it for a couple of years. Now at 8 almost 9 he is starting to pick up books and read them for the enjoyment. All of my others I have learned to relax and enjoy it with them. It has been a much better journey. Thankfully after much prayer and taking it at each kids pace, even my oldest is enjoying reading. I am thankful that God works in the midst of our weaknesses and struggles. After I have taken struggles to him He often corrects them or gives me direction. My oldest has been buddy (paragraph each) reading the Princess and the Goblin with me. It seems a distant time ago when I was fretting about him learning to read print.
Hi April,
I just wanted to let you know my ds 5.5 and I have been using The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading for about a year now. When we first started using it past lesson 26, my son would pretty much have a melt down. I was just going to put it on the shelf too but then I figured out what the problem was (at least for my son). The book is just too thick with too many words/sentences on each page. He would look at a page and just be overwhelmed by the amount of writing on it! So I started using the book this way…..Read the phonics “rule” for the lesson and explain it to him. Then any words/sentences from the lesson I wanted him to sound out I wrote on the whiteboard. We started out doing one word at a time. Now we are up to two sentences at a time on the whiteboard. Also, we don’t do a whole lesson everyday. I break up the “reading the sentences” part over two sometimes three days. Especially when you get deeper into the book there seem to be a lot of sentences for a begining reader (we are currently on lesson 81). We also use the “Bob” books for his confidence. He is currently working through Bob’s set four books. He feels really proud of himself after he has red a Bob book with little or no help from me!
I also just recently purchased the Delightful Reading kit. Love, love, love it! It is beautifully put together and I think it will help build his confidence and fluency by learning sight words and not having to sound every word out!
I wanted to give you our experience and encourage you to try Ordinary Parents Guide in a different way. It is working for us since we modified it and I’d hate to see you spend money on another curriculum.
Best of luck to you!
Shawn
I just realized I didn’t respond to the long vowel question in the first place! Since you already have The Ordinary Parents Guide, look at lesson 65. That’s where the long vowel sounds lessons start in the book. I basically just read that to ds, stressed the second vowel is silent and that it makes the first vowel say its own name. As we are reading words/sentences from the whiteboard, if he starts to use the short vowel sound I simply point to the second vowel put my finger to my lips like I’m saying “quiet” and then point to the first vowel again. He gets it right away and sounds the first vowel using the long vowel sound. I hope this makes sense and helps.
Shawn
Maybe the long vowel concept is just beyond her cognative ability at this point. If she is a young 5 it sounds like she is reading very well for her age. I can understand how she is frustrated, especially if reading has been easy so far. I second the starfall website. My dd6 learned to read pretty easily but we didn’t start lessons until she was 5 and 5 months. She is now 6 and 5 months and we have not done a lesson on long vowels yet but when they come up in books she is reading other than her primers I remind her of the rule and move on. Have patience and certainly don’t buy a whole curriculum! She will learn them but it make take a more average time than frame than learning to read did! Here is something similar to the word wheels you mentioned and they have some strips with short and long vowels on the same strips: http://practicalpages.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/sliding-sound-blends-for-reading-practice/
Thanks for all of the advice! 🙂 I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond.
Kalle — DD loves starfall! I only let her on it every few weeks, though, and just for about 20 minutes each time. Maybe I need to try it again, and be intentional about what she gets to do on there with her 20 minutes(long vowel videos and stories).
Shawn — I tried doing the same thing you did. I knew the sheer amount of words on the page was overwhelming her, so I bought the blue letter set and the white board. It worked to teach/reinforce some blending, but the sentences, while she can read them, are ridiculously twaddly. Eventually I just let her go back to trying to read from a well-written story, and dropped the book altogether. I’ll have to go grab it off the shelf and find lesson 65! 🙂
lgeurink — Thanks for the link to the strips. DD really enjoys the word wheels, so I’ll give these a try. You may be right, and she may not be ready yet. If she doesn’t pick up on it with these few things, we may table any further attempts for six months and just build fluency with what she’s already able to understand.
April
I have told the children that the silent ‘e’ is naughty, that it likes to bonk the other vowel on the head causing the other vowel to say it’s name. When there are two consonants between the vowels the naughty one can’t reach and therefore the other vowel keeps its short sound {most of time that is}.
You can also say the silent ‘e’ scares the other vowel.
Blessings,
Linda<><
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