Time to Read?

I've been thinking about having some sort of poster on the wall to show Tabitha's accomplishments with reading. To showcase the words she knows how to read. I've been thinking about it since I read that Debbie over at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn does something similar with the words from the Progressive Phonics books they use. As we were eating breakfast I decided to see if Tabitha really knew any words. I am actually a little disappointed. I was hoping to avoid the problem of blending sounds to make words. After reading the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons I knew the importance of starting with the continuous sounds like "mmmmm," "ssssssss," "aaaaaaa," etc. Tabitha knows her sounds, but she says each sound separately when sounding out a word, what I was trying to avoid, because that is the way they do it on Starfall.com. Words I thought would be easier for her, because of the continuous sound, like "mat," she struggles with. She seems to have "cat" memorized though.

Anyway, during breakfast, I wrote a list of words, one at a time, on a piece of white computer paper. When she was able to sound it out, with or without help, I attempted to draw a picture of it on the opposite side of the paper. This was all spur of the moment. These are the words I used: cat, can, mat, (Matt is also included because when she finally figured mat out she thought instantly of a friend's brother at church, so I wanted to show her the difference), sand (daddy's contribution) and rat.

Then I separated the words from the pictures by tearing the paper in half.

I separated each word and mixed them up. Tabitha needed to sound the words out and place them next to the correct picture. She needed help with a few. Then I took the pictures away and asked her to hand me the words one at a time as I said them to her.

These spur of the moment "lessons" seem to go over better than ones I plan.

Today I also printed out the first book in the Beginning Phonics section of Progressive Phonics. After thinking about it this morning I decided to take a closer look. It looks quite interesting, but I am not sure now if Tabitha is ready. We got two sentences into it and sometimes she would get the word right other times she didn't. I don't want to push her, and I get frustrated when I think she should be able to do things and she can't (I can feel the old emotions getting ready to burst forth as when the older kids were younger and I tried to work with them. So I backed off quick, as I don't want to frustrate/discourage her.) I will continue to try as long as she is interested.

On a side note, we did spend quite a bit of time on her new Brain Quest cards, at her request. I purchased the 4-5 year old cards as that was the youngest age group the store I bought them at had available. She was able to answer most of the questions on the first 13 cards with virtually no help. I was awed that she remember that 5 pennies equals a nickel, she didn't even have to think about it. She was so upset when MOMMY needed to quit because I needed a break.