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Beginning reading question


mamashark
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I have been receiving advice over in the Learning Challenges group, but I was hoping for maybe some more advice on specific programs that might not be as expensive?

 

My second daughter turns 5 in April, and has been asking to learn to read off and on for the past year. Phonics instruction has not been sticking in her head and each thing I try just frustrates her more, even as I see a real desire to learn to read.

 

Background: she has a diagnosed expressive speech delay and has been receiving private speech therapy for atypical speech patterns for the past year. The SLP is going to be doing language testing this week because her pronoun and verb usage have not improved even in highly structured environments with intensive work for the past year. She has difficulty with organizing thoughts and language and as a result, has some difficulty with answering questions.

 

Academically - she's been working on math, her preferred subject, for the past year off and on as well, and still cannot count to 20 - it took her several months to be able to count to 10, and is now only good with up to about 14 despite many counting games etc. She is good with patterns and colors though. 

 

Working memory seems fine, she can follow directions fine, and her fine and gross motor skills are excellent. Informal neurological screenings by the pediatrician show she's quite smart, but we've not had any official testing done.

 

So for example, she can write her name, but can only identify letters E, A, O, I and S. She can only tell me the sound that S makes. (her name is ELIANA, so most of the letters she can identify are in her name).

 

Any good programs specifically for teaching beginning phonics skills that might be good for her?

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Have you had her vision checked?

 

Since she wants to learn to read, I would begin to give short lessons, teach games and do lots of activities to reinforce the lessons and practice the skills and review the knowledge that she needs to learn. Do not feel like you have to have the perfect program to start. You can do a lot with a little, just keep pouring in that mom-love. :)

 

Do you have a circle time routine going or anything like that? If so work in activities to circle time that focus almost strictly on the "meta" skills that go into reading such as oral blending skills and phonemic awareness. These things can be worked on through games and activities that hopefully won't frustrate her any more. Stock up on lots of educational literacy videos and books for her to enjoy with you. There are a bunch our there, I like the Rock and Learn Phonics because they have the speakers mouth on the screen as the words are pronounced and read. Preschool Prep Meet the Phonics is very gentle also and may help her to learn and remember the sounds.

 

Anyway, work on letter sounds, oral blending, and recognizing letter sounds in the beginning, middle, and ending sounds of words. but do just 2 letters at a time. Start with the letters that she recognizes but doesn't know the sound for. So say you pick the letters "S" and "O". Say the letter sounds, talk about the shape of your mouth when you make that sound, sit side by side and look in the mirror as you say them and make the mouth shapes in a very exxagerated way.

 

Sitting in the mirror, say words with the /s/ sound in the beginning, middle and end and try to find your mouth making the letter shape. "Sssssock" "Yellssssss" or "foressssssssssssee". Try and help her to feel the sounds in her mouth. Let her put her hand on your neck, chest or back as you say the sounds, and then put her hand on her neck, chest or back as she says the sounds.

 

Talk about how vowels are sounds that you have to open your mouth/back of your throat to make the sound of and learn the mouth shapes for all the short vowel sounds. Teach her to make the ASL-hand sign of the letter and play a game of you show her a sign and she tells you the sound. Or you make the mouth shape and she shows you the letter sign in ASL, and/or tells you what sound you're making.

 

Decide if you are teaching upper or lower case letters first--I suggest lower case because only a tiny percent of letters we encounter when reading are uppercase. Be consistent. When you are working on the sounds learn to trace the letter in a sensory tray using an actual hand writing method (I like Spalding handwriting myself). Make a memory game with only the letters that she knows. In the weeks that she's learning S and O, use 4 sets of Ss and 4 sets of Os. Maybe add in pictures that start with S or O to throw in some more challenge and variety without overwhelming her with letter symbols themselves.

 

As you are learning and practicing a group of sounds, blend those two sounds together if they can make a syllable. So, while you're working on "O" and "S" you would orally blend them into so (NOT the word, the sound /s/ + /o/ ) and os and talk about how sounds go together.  Teach the digraphs along with the letters and call them digraphs.

 

Slowly add in the letters to the mix, as she grows comfortable with the first 2, add in a 3rd letter.  Do the same thing each time where you sit in the mirror and learning the mouth shape of the letter, hand sign of the letter, play the "guess which sound I'm thinking of game". Add in the 3rd letter to the memory game, take away 2 sets of the first 2 letters to keep the game from being overwhelming. Try to understand how the letters feels in the body by feeling the throat, chest and back and tracing the letter shape in the sensory tray.

 

Once she has learned 4 or 5 letters + sounds, continue to review via games and take a few days to demonstrate blending them into words. Even if she doesn't learn to blend independently, blend those letter sounds into words for her, exagerating your mouth with the sounds. So say you covered the letters "S" "O" "T" and "N". Then you can say "son" "ton" "not" ont" "sont" "ons" "nos" "nost" "osn" and so on.

 

Using only the sounds that she knows well, say them at regular speed, then say them slowly and exagerate each letter sound as you make it, let her follow your mouth the first couple of days, then on the last 2 days of review, have her close her eyes and say the word with you, repeating it aloud and then say slowly 3 times, speed it up each time and help her learn to listen for the word if there is one. If its non-sense then she can say that its a nonsense word. If its a word, ask her what the word is once she's said it a few times.

 

Then introduce the 6th and 7th letter sounds. 

 

I know it sounds cumbersome but without knowing your daughters unique struggles, I think that if you involve as many of her senses in learning each letter sound as possible and keep the activities varied and practice consistently then it could really help her. She sounds very eager to learn. She's still so young that she isn't expected to be able to read and may not be developmentally ready yet, but since she wants to read so badly, I'd try and build up her meta-reading skills as much as possible so that when she's ready to read, she'll be set to soar.

 

Just continue to introduce letter sounds being very direct and very explicit in your practice. For each letter, go over it in the mirror, teach the mouth shape, body feeling and hand sign of the letters sound. Play games using those three.Blend orally and help her to aurally decode simple words. Have her practice the handwriting strokes for the letter in a sensory tray, and later with markers on a lap-sized white board.

 

As she learns to recognize the letter sounds by shape and sound,then her to begin practicing blending the letter sounds orally and on the page. Get a set of letter magnets if you don't have one and use a cookie tray to build words (real and nonsense) that she can decode using the letter sounds she is learning. Once she knows all of the short vowel sounds, I'd begin teaching her the VC and CVC sight words using the Sight Words by Sounds document.

 

Teaching her phonics directly and explicitly and having her practice on the most frequent words will help her develop fluency in decoding and enable her to buddy read with you in nearly every book. Also look into Progressive Phonics once she's able to reliably decode 2 and 3 letter words. You want her next few months to be successful, so go slow. Very slow. And pump in fun activities all over the place.

 

 

Best of luck.

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Not sure what you have already tried but how about trying to teach her the letters and their sounds via songs or rhymes ? There are some great songs and rhymes out there. In fact, I'm using a preschool curriculum that uses them along with other hands on stuff and I'm actually quite surprised how fast my kiddo is picking it up (much faster than my older girl did with whom I used a different method with). I'm sure you can find a ton of stuff on line. Perhaps it's more of a personality difference with my girls and not the method but I wanted to throw that idea out there anyway. :-)

Edited by HeartatHome
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Have you checked out the Kumon books? They have different ones for fine motor skills like cutting, mazes for pencil skills, etc. There is a group for letters that could help her recognize them more easily as she practices writing them. The same with the number books which practices writing numbers and uses fun exercises like dot to dots to master counting. DS really struggled with teen numbers for some reason and books like Kumon and dot to dots really helped him figure it out. Also consider getting an inside thermometer. We got one with a sensor outside so everyday DS would practice telling us the temperature inside and outside which was amazing help with his number recognition. Of course we live in CA so the numbers never got into the teens which could explain why he could count into the 70s but always messed up the teen numbers.

 

Check out Memoria Press First Start Reading. It is a wonderful beginning phonics program that is super gentle. It begins with a letter page with pictures to color. The next page is a blank half to draw a picture of something that begins with that letter. The bottom half of the page starts with words to trace and copy. It starts with simple blends like C....at to work on putting the cccc sound together with at to make cat. It helps solidify the practice of blending by writing it. It builds up to short paragraph stories to read with reading comprehension questions.

 

Once blending CVC words is going well you could consider AAR. It has wonderful exercises and builds very nicely on each lesson to teach reading incrementally. The scripted nature is so easy to teach and it's easy to speed up or go slowly as needed. We went very slowly with AAR1 because DS could not blend at all when we started. I wish I had started with MP before starting AAR1 to give him a chance to get blending since the timing would have been better. Now in AAR3 he really gets it and goes through each lesson super quick and often asks for another one.

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I can't speak to your child's specific disability, but I'd check out Dancing Bear from Sound Foundations and their related programs.  They have a program that is meant to teach blending to children who have been unable to develop this skill on their own.  All of their materials can be previewed in their entirety online, and they are less expensive than the other O-G based programs I've seen.  My son is using Dancing Bears A now after plateauing on OPGTR and it's very easy to teach with all of the instructions in the text (but not mixed up in the text like 100EZ lessons, which was extremely distracting for both of us).

 

 

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  • 2 months later...

I know this thread is a few months old.  Hopefully your DD has been making progress!   I'm not sure if she's having difficulty pronouncing letters and/or identifying them.   But as far as phonics and the alphabet go, I recommend:

 

Leapfrog Letter Factory

Leapfrog Phonics Farm

Leapfrog Word Caper

Leapfrog Talking Words

Leapfrog Amazing Alphabet

Baby Babble (all titles)

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