4KookieKids
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Try blending from the left-- B... a ...BA...T BAT.
Yes, normal.
Deletion of sounds is a 7 year old skill--here's a chart. Maybe that's getting in the way.
We do blend from the left, but it's just hard to keep him focused on the page. It's like there's some weird processing going on in his head while he stares off and I don't know what it is. :) He only rarely reads words backwards or starts from the right.
That chart is interesting - thanks! Maybe it does make sense why he can't "correct" himself right away, since the sounds he adds are usually in the middle of words, so deleting them is a much later developing skill (9ish years according to the chart). Maybe I'll just try moving on once I point out the additional sound, and then coming back to it at the end and seeing if he can do it correctly "fresh."
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Does he have a strong verbal memory? Perhaps you can reassure yourself that even if you do need to read instructions to him over the next year or so, you'll not likely need to do a lot of repeating and explaining.
What is verbal memory? Is it remembering words you hear? Is it associating the spoken word with a word that you see/read?
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Hmmm... Thanks for all the suggestions. He's definitely a very active kiddo who has a hard time sitting and he's always playing or fiddling with something (I've found having him point to the word he's reading with a pen or something helps him stay a tad more focused). But he loves playing word games while doing other things, and I've actually had to ask him to STOP rhyming while doing his chores because he'd been rhyming for the last two hours straight and I just couldn't take it anymore!!! (when he runs out of real words, he just makes up nonsense words, and then he switches languages and keeps rhyming there, since he's bilingual) lol. It's interesting (and a little strange, I'll admit) for me to see how he can do/process SO much verbally (makes up elaborate stories in two different languages, rhymes complicated words, etc.) and enjoy so many good books/audiobooks (his current favorite is 8 hours long!) while having no interest in reading. That was so NOT me as a child. :)
I think part of my problem (not his...) is that I am more of a relaxed learning sort of person (grew up in Germany where kids don't learn to read until 6 or 7) and I kind of like the idea of kids playing more than "schooling" at this age -- BUT I'm feeling some pressure to get him reading decently in the next year because I have two younger kids and a new one on the way, and I'm a little nervous/overwhelmed at the idea of trying to start "real school" in a year or two with so many littles underfoot. It seems like it might be easier (for me, at least!) if he could at least read some basics (e.g. the instructions in the math workbook he loves doing) by then. So on the one hand, I really want to just ignore it / go with the flow, but I'm stressed that it's going to come back to bite me when he's 7 and still not reading and I have three younger kiddos (and who knows if more will be on the way?) and it's time to start something more "real" but he needs me to read him everything still! But that is more my own baggage and speculation and fear talking, so I'll probably just give over to the first side of me that says to relax and just enjoy him. :)
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My 5.5 yo often adds in sounds that aren't there, like "club" for "cub" or "krit" for "kit" -- is this normal? I try to correct him and just move on, but once he's added in a sound, having him re-read the word doesn't work. It's like he's got some sort of weird memory thing going where he can't take the extra sound out once he's just said it the other way.
Also, he has the strange tendency to look at a word and then try to sound it out while staring at the wall or ceiling. I encourage him to look at the word, because later parts of the word definitely deviate from the actual word pretty badly, but I sometimes think he gets overwhelmed by all the letters and just trying to process by staring off like that.
Are these normal behaviors? If so, will they resolve themselves with time, or is there something I should be actively doing to address them?
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I have a 5.5 yo who has little to no interest in reading. He enjoys being read to (especially if he can play legos or do mazes at the same time!), loves listening to audiobooks while playing, and often enjoys looking at illustrated books on his own. I don't want to push him too much and turn him off to it, but I feel like 10 minutes a day shouldn't be tortuous (he'd like to tell you otherwise) and could help him get started if it's consistent.
So, once we get past complaining (it's so hard! I don't want to! I was in the middle of playing ((though that lasts all morning, so the excuse doesn't mean much to me...)! It's boring! etc.) and he settles down to do it, he's actually not so bad at sounding things out. But he's SO distractible! Today he read "in... sect... insect!" and then proceeds to give me examples of sentences ("Like, there's a bee!") followed by zooming things around (fingers, pencils, etc.) pretending they're bugs and making up a few stories about insects. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get him back on task, but it usually takes several minutes to get back to the words we're reading. Left to his own devices, he can easily amuse himself by doing the above on five words, and there go my 10 minutes of reading lesson... Or he looks over the words we're going to be reading and gets excited " ing! I love ing! It's my favorite sound! Oh... these words don't have ing..." and then later starts adding "g" to words that have "in" because he "just likes ing so much that it's hard to say in".... And I feel like I'm apologizing that so few words have his favorite sounds! lol.
I've been trying to address the distractibility and keep him moving, but am wondering if I should just accept and appreciate that he's a 5 yo with a great imagination. Thoughts? This is definitely a reading-only issue. The kid loves art and math and will build and design and draw and paint until the cows come home... While I *generally* feel that later is fine and I don't want to push my kids, I feel like 10 minutes a day should be do-able at this age, but I'm beginning to doubt myself.
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Please forgive me if this has been asked recently (and feel free to direct me to the appropriate thread(s)!) - I didn't seen what I wanted when I tried searching through old threads, so I thought I'd give it a go with a new question: What are the best apps that are either free or inexpensive (but one-time fees and not subscription based) for the first few elementary years? I feel like I've been spending hours looking through apps and finding good ones, only to download them and find that very little is actually free (e.g., a sight-word app has only 6 words on the free version...), and almost everything is paid-content (E.g. Starfall -- we loved starfall on the computer, so thought the app would be similar, but there's far less available for free on the app than on the online version, and I was so disappointed.) I've downloaded at least a dozen apps in the last few days that all have much less free than I expected from the summary and screen shots.
So what are your favorite android apps for K-3 that have a good bit of stuff for free before moving on to paid?
(I'm not trying to cheat anybody out of their dues - I know these apps take time to develop and I respect the people that do it. I'm just being cheap now out of necessity for right now! We don't spend a lot of time in front of the kindle, which is why I don't want to do any subscription based ones, but it'd be nice to have some pretty good educational ones to use as a "reward" for certain other achievements or long car rides...)
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I've been trying to find a good math placemat for my boy, and am pretty disappointed with my findings so far. I've checked out Melissa & Doug and the ones at Rainbow Resource, and a few other random ones on Amazon. I want something that is visual in the sense of not just lots of equations, but also not just simple counting. IDEALLY, what I would look would be split into six different sections, and each section would look something like this:
[[ Picture with number bonds (singapore style) of whole 10 with parts 9 and 1 ]]
10 = 9 + 1
10 = 1 + 9
[[ Picture of two rows of five circles, with 9 in one color, and 1 in the another color]]
10 - 9 = 1
10 - 1 = 9
And this framework would be repeated for 10+0, 9+1, 8+2, 7+3, 6+4, and 5+5. Extras would be ok, too, but I'd really like it to have at least these basic components.I feel like it's just what makes *sense* when learning things that make 10, and yet no one seems to have one like this. Can anyone point me in the right direction? If not, I'm resigned to just making my own and having Office Max laminate it, but common sense says that *someone* else has probably already done it! :) -
Yeah if I spoke German it would be easier. That's really the biggest problem. I don't. And DH doesn't talk much. And he isn't with the kids as much as I am. So requiring them to speak German for those rare instances isn't very realistic. But otherwise, I'd probably make a bigger issue of it. People have said I should just learn German. I really am not motivated to and I only have so much time and energy. If I get to talk to my husband 30 minutes a day I don't want it spent talking with a tiny vocabulary.
But from your parent's POV they may have cared more about their relationship with you than a second language. That's how I've seen it with my own kids. I don't want them hating their dad and refusing to talk to him. KWIM?
I get this. We used to be a bit more strict OPOL, but it was really affecting the kids' relationship with their dad, since he doesn't speak German (and is also not motivated to learn it, with everything else on his plate).
I think, looking back, my parents just didn't want to make a big deal of it. They figured it was my choice. But I think that, in part, they thought I understood the implications of that choice more than I actually did. It wasn't until my early 20's that I started to really understand those implications. I'd struggled so much with being "different" that I'd just wanted to put it all behind me so that I could fit in. I wish that they had explained more of the reason behind staying bilingual and the motivation, age-appropriately, of course.
For me, raising my kids bilingually is a little bit like making sure my kids eat their vegetables (just a little *wink). I think it's important. Sometimes they like it, sometimes they don't, but I think it's what's best for them, so I require it regardless of their feelings that day. I may sympathize with them, and I certainly communicate my love for them so that my relationship with them doesn't suffer as a result. They may cry and whine and try desperately to get out of it. But once they accept that it's a fact of life, things go a bit more smoothly. It still may be hard, but I don't think it affects our relationship. I have seen parent-child conflicts that really do harm the relationship, and most of them aren't language related, honestly (since most of my friends aren't multi-lingual). I think it's less about the language, and more about how you deal with it. :)
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So I have experience being the reluctant child *and* being the parent of a reluctant child. My experience was that if I didn't want to speak German, and my parents were willing to accept English (regardless of their "encouragement" to do otherwise), I did not speak German. I see the same patterns with my own children. The fact is that learning another language is hard. Maintaining another language is even harder. My 5 yo son resists speaking German some, and he's very honest about his reasons: it's hard, and speaking English is just easier and faster, and he can say what he wants to much better. We talk alot about why we're speaking/learning German as he deals with these issues, so that he can start to understand the motivation (and hopefully, internalize its value).
Until he finds his own motivation, though, I accept that it's my responsibility to keep him on track. My parents let me slide by with the bare minimum, responding in English when they were speaking German, and I wish they hadn't - even though I know that it was my own choice. You said you're homeschooling in English because he can't grasp the concepts in Spanish: I think that there are no concepts in 1st grade that will stick with him as much as getting him comfortable with a second language, and the academics themselves should be set aside to make the language learning a priority (if it really is important to you). I would switch to doing as much Spanish as you could, even if he doesn't understand it all right now. Immersion is how kids learn best and quickest, and the expectation that he needs to be speaking Spanish needs to be clear (even if you have some grace with him while he adjusts, so that he doesn't end up too frustrated). But some frustration is ok. My boy will speak English when super excited and I don't have time to slow him down. But he knows that, in general, if he can't say something he wants to in German, he should say as much of the sentence as he *can* in German, before switching to English. And then I give him the words he needs to complete the sentence in German. I am constant reminding my kids to speak in German, and we're in a really challenging time right now because the younger siblings are finally talking, and so now I have to get them speaking German to each other as well as me. Sometimes it works; often it doesn't. But I think the key is to stop accepting English as the default. :)
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Thanks for all the input and ideas! This morning I told him that if he knew a word without sounding it out (or if he just wanted to sound it out in his head), that he could say it without sounding it out (but that sounding it out is still great, too), and he started saying the words without sounding them out! Granted, it took him quite a while, and I'm pretty sure he was still forming the sounds with his mouth (at least most of the time), but he was SO proud of himself. :)
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Both my older kids love the game, "I'm thinking of an animal whose name starts with tie and ends with ger. What is it?" While on walks or in the car they will play it for as long as I can come up with different animals.
My 5 year old is reading Frog and Toad books, but still acts like he has solved a complicated riddle when he combines /f/ and /ish/ to discover I am thinking of a fish.
Sometimes we play it the opposite way: "I'm thinking of the FIRST part of the word cupcake. What is the first part? What is the last part?"
Sometimes we do rhyming riddles. "I'm thinking of something you play with in the winter that rhymes with head." My three year old can't yet rhyme, so for now he just throws out random guesses - A SNOWMAN!!
Wendy
I tried these tonight at dinner and my 5 yo had lots of fun, but my poor 3 yo definitely needs some practice! I asked her what animal starts with "c" and ends with "at", and she thought for a moment and then shouted "elephant!" My hubby and I just started laughing, while my 5 yo shouted, "no, it's CAT!". It was a pretty good time. :)
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How about you indulge her and keep doing the same lessons over and over? Is she happy with those lessons you're doing or does she want more?
Lol. Yes, she will sit there with me with the sheet of letters in front of her and say the sounds while matching (e.g., point to A and say "ah" and then she'll find the lowercase a and say "ah"... repeat with the next letter, which is a lowercase m or something.... say "mmm" and match it to the M). It's just ME that's bored with it. :) Especially with the 5 yo and 1 yo running around and me pregnant. ;) I was just hoping to get out of doing the same thing every day, I think!
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My 3 yo is getting very pushy about wanting reading lessons like big bro (5 yo). Goes and get his first HOP booklet and sits down and wants to go through it. I've tried starting it with her, but there's only so many times we can play match-the-letter sounds on the alphabet page (she definitely knows her sounds! :P) and she just doesn't seem ready to go on the first page of "reading." She can make the sound when I point to letters, and she can say-it-fast when I sound out a word slowly, but she doesn't seem to get the idea of putting sounds together on her own yet. So then I tried avoidance methods: distracting her with other activities/books/toys, but she's a very determined little thing.
Please give me some ideas of what to do! I feel bad saying it (I don't want anyone to think I'm lazy or a bad parent), but I think I'm going to go crazy if we have to keep doing letter sounds (I'd rather do nothing than keep repeating these multiple times a day when she clearly gets them). She loves workbooks, but still needs 1-1 while doing them to help her know what to do, and I can only do that so much in a day either. She loves to play games, dress up, art, stamps, wrestle, play outside, etc. and we do plenty of that. But I don't know how to get her to move past this insistence on reading lessons (big bro only does them 5 minutes a day anyway!).
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5 yo is starting to sound out more complicated words (5-6 letters, ones with digraphs, etc.) but regularly sounds out each letter/sound in the word before putting them all together. Even cvc words that he can read easily are still sounded out. I guess I'm wondering what he needs to get past "sounding out" words. Is it just more time, more practice, a developmental thing, or something else? I guess I'm a little concerned that there's something I'm just missing?
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I don't know about the subtitles thing, but we do the same as Lawyer&Mom. Shipping is pretty reasonable, and we only order a few times a year. Easy to play on multi-region dvd players (or an external dvd drive, if you use your computer for watching movies).
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I get German audiobooks all the time, and they're set up just like the American amazon site: if you're willing to get them electronically (rather than on CD), they outsource to the audible website (in my case, audible.de). No shipping, immediate access, and great prices. There are, however, a few issues with international media laws (which means that I have access to tons of materials, but not EVERYTHING that I could see if I actually had a german credit card).
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Thanks for this! I'm interested to see what we can come up with for figuring out how to purchase it over here. :)
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For OP: a quick search found this. http://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/e00366/chapter5.pdf
It discusses a bit the disadvantages and challenges of learning to read in a language that is not one's mother tongue based on ESL observations. HTH
This is a really interesting read! Second language aside -- this is great material!
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I agree with most of what has already been said. I'll just add that we started teaching my oldest to read in German first, thinking that it's so much more phonetic and would be much easier. His English was just so much stronger than his German (even though I suspect he's been "fluent" for a year or two already), that it was really hard. Not only was it difficult, in general, but we ran across two other barriers that I didn't foresee: (1) He *wanted* to learn to read English first, because all his friends were, and (2) German doesn't have the equivalent of our "first readers." Because Germans are usually taught to read in school, and because it's really phonetic and easy, their "first readers" are simple chapter books, which was way daunting to my then 4-year old. I wonder if French is the same way? If so, I'd definitely reconsider. As it is, I think reading for kids should be more about understanding "which" word is on the page (ie, the should already know the word and its meaning in most cases) than about reading a new word and figuring out what it means as well.
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Thanks, all. I decided not to get a touchscreen laptop for now, but hubby is borrowing a kindle from someone and seeing what sort of fun he can have with the kids on it too.
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I need to buy a new computer and am looking for something cheap. I'm also mindful that there may be apps or programs that my kids may like and may be educational (letters, reading, strokes, etc.) but don't know much (or anything) about them, given that I haven't bought a new computer in... 8 years... and I definitely don't have a smart phone.
What are your recommendations? Is a touchscreen worth it? I don't care about my own use of it -- only the little ones (age 5, 3, and 1 but the babe doesn't get to touch squat on the computer! :D)
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If they were at our library, I wouldn't buy them either. Unfortunately, the Life of Fred books don't qualify for the 20% discount at Mardel's. They're not allowed to discount them, according to customer service. :(
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I've been waiting for the elementary life of fred books to go on sale so I could pick up the first few to do with my boy. I kicked myself after I let the sale last fall on educents go, because we couldn't afford it at the time. I've looked all over trying to find the best deals, used books, etc, but it seems to me that these books just tend to be $16 each (even more on ebay), regardless of used or new.
Mardel is offering 20% off all homeschool materials this Thursday, so I'm thinking that might be the time to pick some up, but I just wanted to see if anybody else has any other/better ideas first.
Thanks!
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It's in a different language, but maybe you'd like to check out the three cursive options (VA, LA, and SAS) at the bottom of the page http://www.unkonzentrierte-schueler.de/Pages/GratisDownload.aspx
We're doing the LA script, and they have an entire set of workbook pages for it online http://www.unkonzentrierte-schueler.de/Pages/SchreibschriftbuchstabenLA.aspx (the other two have similar pages elsewhere).
There's an interesting thread about cursive over on the bilingual board http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/517300-cursive-in-different-languages/ that might help if you're considering moving away from the traditional American cursive.
PreK for English Learner
in PreK and K
Posted
Yeah, I think any gentle prek program would be fine. Most of it is learning the names of stuff (letters, shapes, etc.) anyway, and kids really do pick up quickly. I have several friends who've moved countries while kids were school age, and for most of them, it only took about 6-12 weeks for kids to gain a passive fluency of the language (understood almost all spoken, but didn't speak it well yet). His speaking will just take time and lots of positive encouragement. I think they're more hesitant to talk when they've been through that sort of major upheaval (much more shocking than just moving countries *with* an established family).