What DIDN'T you like about Delightful Reading???

I am glad I purchased the DR.  It has really helped me to better understand and define to myself what I am doing, but I am not using it as a daily curriculum.  I am using DR the way I use cookbooks, as a springboard.  I don’t follow everything, even to using one of my daughter’s favorite books instead of the selections in the DR.  I know I chose correctly from the way she had me act out the scene of her as a toddler climbing on grandma’s piano bench and begging her aunt to play the song from the book.

One of the changes I am making is giving her a print out of the day’s reading words.  I noticed that she kept wanting to draw or doodle instead of looking at the words.  Now, the first thing I am having her do is draw or doodle on the paper, while I work with her big sister, and then she has her words in a prettier setting to learn them.  I scatter the words on the page, in the order we’re going to learn them.  I use columns, and I keep the word in the column matching its place in the line on which we’re working.  For instance, the fourth word might be the first one on which we work that day.  I put it in the fourth column at the top of the page.  The second word might be the third one on which we work.  I put it in the second column a little above the mid-point.

The next two days, we play with the words (word building).  Again, I print the word lists so she can doodle/draw.  Here, I color-code the words.  Red font for words which follow the rules.  (She loves pink.)  Green for words which revert to the other vowel/consonant sound.  Blue for the words which do their own thing.  I do some background shading (purple, again a favorite) for words with shadow/silent letters. 

I started doing this because she loves color so much.  I also remembered that when I would answer a test question or recall a scripture verse, visualizing its placement on the page of notes or of the Bible would always help me:  it’s midway down in the right hand column of the left page.  That’s how my mind would file it.  I guess it’s a bit like tags.  Also, children’s books have pictures, which make the children interested.  They have to get a bit older before they are interested in black and white books.  I’m building on the stage where my daughter is.

I also do not always stick to only the immediate ending as the book does.  I may look at a different part of the word to show how it acts in other words.  Or as someone else suggested, a smaller part, as in the vowel combination.  Or as with -er, I took the opportunity to show how -er adds to different adjectives and verbs and how it changes the initial word.  I don’t expect my six-year-old to remember all of that, but it was helpful to my eight-year-old, who joins us for such times.  I found that my kids were able to reason at ages when others would tell me kids can’t reason.  They could because I had reasoned with them from the beginning, before they could understand, and they grew into it.  I don’t mind exposing children to new ideas before they are ready.  I just don’t demand her to be able to explain it back to me.  I drop a seed and expect it to die until the time for it to come to life.