Reading Time

How do you start your mornings?

We begin with sight words. At 5:45am, no less.

Not really. :) I found this on the refrigerator the other morning, and if I scramble the letters at night, Delaney is sure to spell a new one for me when she gets up the next day. The Starfall curriculum introduces A LOT of high frequency words each week. When I began reading through the guide and preparing for our weeks, I was very skeptical and almost adjusted how we would use the words. I thought it through, and decided that Delaney has not shown me any frustration with the learning pace yet, and I shouldn't make things any easier unless I determine that we need to.

On that note, we have been following the lesson plans closely and working hard. Delaney can now read the following words:

he, like, the, at, on, us, and, me, I, to, she, A, a, not, love, am, an, can, are, we, you, likes, for, up, see, is, be, in, it, go, big, down, but, and little.

Some other random words she recognizes but are not on The List are:
going, today, all the days of the week, names of family members, and most likely some that I am not remembering right now.

We play many sight word games: Concentration, Flip a Card (I hide m&m's under the card, she flips, reads, eats), bingo, Flyswatter Words (I say the word, she hits it with a flyswatter), and our Morning Message 3-4 times weekly.

She read this all by herself, with the exception of the words "Gavin's house".

She is beginning to find sight words in all sorts of texts...picture books, signs around town, even my own textbook for a class I am taking.

She is getting better and better at blending and decoding words. We began with an alphabet rainbow (alphabet magnets on a painted cookie sheet in a rainbow shape) and some picture cards. I say the name of the picture, and she segments the sounds and spells the word. After we did this exercise for a few days, I had her begin with the letters, decode the word, and pick the correct picture card.

This is her basket of "Books I Can Read By Myself". We try to have her read one of these before we read her bedtime book each night.

It's missing a few right now because they are in the living room in our day's lineup of books she wants to read.

She thinks it is really cool that she can read part of  Hop on Pop, and the first BOB book all by herself. I think she is pretty cool, too.