I am sure others are more qualified to answer but..we are on lesson 103. ( but he has done lessons 125-? also while I wasn't looking!
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) my son is 4 we started around Christmas time.
Like you many times I have questioned just how much is going into his spongy brain, and this is my 3rd time using flash cards! ( yep I am hard to convince
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).
I shall tell you what I have noticed so far, as he is 4 he is more likely to actually show me what he knows than a toddler is. We only watch each lesson once, not twice.
He knows what all the pictures are that have been shown to him. Now you may not think that's a big deal but go find a 4 year old who can tell you what a wall hook is! He has learnt HEAPS just in that general knowledge part.
He is confident with his colour words and knows his colours. He had to have learnt the words from LR. He was fascinated by them as the words didn't match the colors of the font ( which drove me nuts!
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)
He has read a number of words by sight. He never reads them when I ask him to
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but he can, I have sprung him reading cards along with Utube videos of other babies reading!
I am quite sure the pattern phonics is sinking in. He has a unusually fast ability to understand any phonics activities I put in front of him. Today I gave him pegs with alphabet letters on them. I asked him to peg the letter sound to a matching plastic animal. Using the first sound of the word. He did the whole alphabet, I helped him with about 6 letters. He also tried to make C say SSSSS, interesting? we do some phonics stuff at home but not enough o generate this result.
Finally I am convinced, from my previous children that flashing these words helps. They are both excellent readers, well above their peers. Plus they are as good as the number of cards they saw. My oldest saw many more cards and she is better at instant word recognition and fluency.
Keep going! Have faith. Add some phonics activities if you want to speed up the point of actually reading books as opposed to just words.