Hannah learned the letter names and sounds pretty early on, but she just couldn’t understand the concept of blending the sounds or “sounding it out.” We worked on short-vowel-A for a couple of years, to no avail. So I decided to skip right to whole words and see if that approach would help. It did. Here’s how we did that:
We made it a game. First, I wrote on index cards the names of three very different locations in the room where we were doing our school work: bed, window, chair. I showed her a card, told her what the word was, then we went together to place the card in its corresponding location. After a few days of that simple and short exercise, I handed her the card and read the word aloud to see if she could put it where it belonged without my help. Next step, I handed her the card and didn’t say the word aloud. Once she was able to match the words on the cards with their locations (without any help from me), we played the game.
She would step into the hall and hide her eyes. I would then hide a small toy in one of the three locations. I’d let her know when I was ready and she would come back into the room. Then I would hold up the card that had the location of where the toy was hidden. If she read it correctly, she would go to that place and find the toy (instant positive reinforcement); if she misread it, she wouldn’t find the toy (instant gentle feedback/correction).
Once we had learned some nouns on cards, I introduced some verbs and we acted them out. Then we started putting sentences together with the cards.
Once she could read ten or more word cards, I started doing very short word-building exercises on the side using a word she knew, just to try to reinforce the letters and sounds aspect. She started reading when she was 11. She’s now 23 and reading at a third-grade level, reading words that I never taught her.
Perhaps this short description of our experience will give you some ideas for your son.
