What's After Delightful Reading – PLEASE INPUT!!

If he is finding beginning reading to be easy, you could begin some readers for practice. All of my reading kids started out with the Pathway series. They progress in level as your child needs. You could have your child read aloud to you, and also keep some flash cards of new words to work on every week.

http://www.rodandstaffbooks.com/list/Pathway_Readers/

One more thing…I haven’t used Hymns for Prose, but I plan to buy for my younger kids when they begin reading. It looks really good!

http://simplycharlottemason.com/books/hymns-in-prose/

Sounds like he’s ready to just read for fluency.  I’d let him start reading books a bit below his level.  If he wants to read longer/harder books, he’ll let you know.  I’ve always done it this way because moving to “real books” seemed a bit daunting to my boys.  This way they built confidence while still building skill.  Have him read to you.  If he comes to words he doesn’t know, tell him what they are.  If there’s a pattern he’s had before, you might bring it to his attention, but I don’t do this often.  It gets tedious for them and they just want to get on with the story.  You might mentally keep a list of words to later go over if need be.  This is an exciting time!  The world of learning opens up to them when they can read.  Enjoy!

My DD was like that, too.  Reading just seemed to suddenly click for her.  I just continued to give her lots to read and had her read aloud regularly so I could hear if she had any trouble with any specific words or phonics combinations. 

I plan to do a good review when we start really addressing spelling, so that if there is anything that she has missed, we have another chance to go over it.

Joanne

I not familiar with the Delightful Reading lessons, but as far as I know, CM’s recommendations for teaching reading include phonics.  I just read volume one of CM’s books and she talks about teaching the short vowels, long vowels, and then combinations such as ‘ing’.  There is much more to her ‘method’ than that, of course, but the phonics shouldn’t be left out. 

Anyway, there are so many ways to teach phonics.  We use an online program called ClicknRead, although my DD only did about 40 of the 100 lessons before she just took off reading and complained about it being boring.  (DS is using it now and will go through all the lessons.) Right now I just briefly mention the ‘rule’ that applies to any words she doesn’t know to help her decode it.

Then, in a year or two (she is only 6 now) I plan on just reviewing all the phonics skills, from the perspective of learning to spell words as we get more into writing.  We have a bunch of phonics workbooks that I’ll use just for my own reference to make sure I hit all the skills.  We’ll practice spelling words using each phonics rule, and then probably talk about them as we notice words that use those rules in the books we read.  She is already an excellent reader, but I think it’s important to have the phonics base as well.  I still even use phonics when I meet a new word!

Others may have spelling programs to suggest, in fact I’m sure there have been threads in this forum recently about spelling.  Or I’m sure you can find a million resources on all the free worksheet sites and reading programs available online.  A quick search should give you lots of options.

Joanne