It's Peanut again.... Today, she finished a book...... Let's start with last year, where I introduced her to the pre-literacy books "Let's Get Ready For the Code". These books taught her to write the consonants of the alphabet, lower case and upper case letters, and their sounds. She spent just a few days on each letter, enough to make it stick, but not to be boring. She liked it much better than other phonics books that we had tried, so I figured we'd stick with the books if she succeeds. My hope is really that she learns how to read this way.
She finished all three books fairly quickly. So this year, we officially started with the "Explode the Code" books. There are 14 books in total. The first book started with the letter family of -at and moved slowly through more and more families, including all five vowels. We only did one page a day, so we moved really slowly. I want her to want to learn how to read, which she still doesn't want. So I am trying to find a balance between letting her lead without giving up all control - because then we wouldn't learn at all, right? Some of the exercises she liked, others she didn't so much. Those were usually the ones where she had to write the words multiple times. It was also hard for her to read sentences on her own in order to match it to the picture shown in the book.
At the end of the book, so today, she had to read the two paragraphs you see on the left. It took her while to figure out all the words, but in the end, she was so proud of herself that she read that much and figured out the riddle. She beamed as you can see on the right. Now we are off to book 1 1/2. I do want her to repeat a few things before we are moving on to book 2. Hopefully soon, she will be ready to skip the half books, and just reads on her own. Until then, we practice every single day.
There is a good review by Cathy Duffy, the author of '100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum'.
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