Recently I posted that my almost 2 year old son was not reading or recognizing words even though I had been teaching him basically since birth. I thought I would give you all an update on our progress especially for those who may feel discouraged like I was.
My son has always been very averse to testing. But, if he knows something well he likes to point things out and show his knowledge. For example when he learned his colors all of a sudden everything he talked about now included its color. His basketball is no longer just a basketball it is an orange basketball. This is why I was pretty sure he was not recognizing many words.
We had already expanded our reading program to include watching short vowel presentations from readingbear.org and doing a lot of games with phonological awareness. I mentioned in my last post that he was starting to answer correctly questions like "what does cow start with?" and "what word is c - a -t?" Now he gets these questions right just about everytime no mather what the word. I put on readingbear and we went through all the short “o” presentation (not all at once) and he could tell me what basically every word was. There was one he chose not to answer. I am not sure if he didn't know it or just didn't want to. He even answered words that I wasn’t sure if they were part of his vocabulary. I did sound them out for him, although I think he could do it himself I just want to be really sensitive and not push it.
I also mentioned at the end of the other thread that when I put toys under bowls and wrote the names of the toys on the bowls he could pick the right bowl the toy was under. After just a few times of this he could not only choose which was the correct out of two choices he could now read outloud all the words on the bowls. At one point I wondered if he could not learn with the whole word method. Obviously he can!
I am really very grateful to daddude for readingbear and to everyone for everything I have learned on this forum. (You guys rock!) I am so excited that he is learning to phonetically sound out words. I would be happy with him just recognizing words at this age but now I don’t have to worry about whether or not he is going to pick up the phonics code. I still show him Little Reader. I think it can still help him and if nothing else the vocabulary that he learns from it is worth it. I sometimes think vocabulary development is more important as there comes a point where reading becomes more about comprehension than decoding.
He has seen all the short vowel presentations on readingbear several times. But, we have also done a lot of orally sounding out words without looking at letters. Now I am not sure if I should go through all the presentations again and have him say the words like I did with short o to make sure he has them mastered before he moves on. He used to be VERY into readingbear. His interest has waned considerably and that could just be because he has already learned what is in the presentations I am showing him. I am just cautious to move him too fast as I have read a lot how important mastery is when learning phonics.
Beyond reading I am completely blown away by his progress with Little Musician. At first I didn’t buy LMs because I felt like we weren’t getting very far with reading and I didn’t want to add anything else plus it was not really in our budget. Well, I did end up buying it. I believe it has been a little bit less than a month and in the solfege section he can read the notes and sing them in the correct pitch before I play the sound for him. I have only caught him doing this only a couple of times as I don’t want to test him, but it is enough for me to be amazed. I can’t read “mi” and sing it in the right pitch, but he can. He really likes it to. He especially likes the songs in solfege. He always asks for “the notes” and in particular he wants “the notes with re”. He likes re because it is orange like his basketball.
When the song plays he yells out, “There’s so!” , “There’s two re’s” , “Ha ha, that fa!” as if to say “silly fa!” It is so cute.
Anyway as everyone was so nice to respond to my last post with encouragement and advice I wanted to let everyone know that it is working! I am so excited to see what happens next!
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