Currently Wesley is sent home with Level H books for home reading, which is pretty age appropriate.
Wesley surprised me yesterday! I pulled out on of our Bellatrix Potter books "The Tale of Peter Rabbit". With the intentions of reading it out loud to him. I had been reading about how important it is to read more classical stories to children that are above their grade level. I started reading it and about half way through he stopped me and told me it was his turn to read. He picked up the book and read the rest to me with about 85% accuracy. I was shocked, especially when I looked the book up after and realized it was at a grade3.5 level or Level L !! He is in grade 1.
We are on lesson 13 of the book "The Reading Lesson"
http://www.readinglesson.com/TRLbook.html. He can read must of it quite easily, but we are working more on the phonic rules. I was getting frustrated for a while because I knew he knows how to read words with the silent e. But when there was just a list of words, it was like he was just trying too hard and kept messing them up. But when it was time to read the mini stories, they just rolled off his tongue with ease. I'm starting to think I we should read the pages with just words together and then he can read the stories on his own. What do you guys think? This way I can explain the rules to him, but focus more on input instead of output. Perhaps I'll get further with him that way.
I'm so glad that I discovered early learning, even if he was already a preschooler. Anyone that is second thinking EL because their child is already 3,4,5 years old, just do it. Sure they might not learn as quickly as a 6 month old, but they will learn!