The sounding out stage of reading

[MistyMountain]

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[boscopup]

It takes time and practice. It may be a lot of time, or it may be very little time. Every kid is different. My oldest went from not blending at all to blending easily and reading at a 1.5 grade level in a single day. My middle son has been able to blend since early age 4, and now at 6, he still has to sound out a lot of the words, but he is able to read some of them quicker. He can do Bob books and I See Sam books (highly recommend the latter - you could do them now), but he isn't ready for the early readers at the library yet. We use Dancing Bears as our reading curriculum, and I just spend 10 minutes a day working through the book. I have seen huge improvement. He can read the sentences and stories in there.

 

Middle son also is in speech therapy, and he could blend before he could say all his letter sounds. I worked with him on the sounds anyway, as it helped isolate those sounds so he could try to say them. And if I knew he was trying to say the right thing and just physically couldn't do it, I let it go. Right now, we're having issues with his /ch/ sounding like a mixture of /sh/ and /ch/, so we've practiced those sounds some, and I'll be pointing out the problem to his SLP when we go this week. I assume your son is in speech therapy right now?

 

My 3.5 year old can read Bob books and the like, but he can't say some of the sounds that are normal for 3 year olds to not be able to say, such as /th/, and he's just beginning to be able to say /l/ but still uses /y/ for that sound a lot ("I'm yittle." is awfully cute). Again, if we're reading something, I accept it if it sounds like he's trying to say the correct thing. Once he can say it in speech, I think it will transfer to his reading also.

 

The only issues my middle son had with mixing up sounds in reading was /m/ and /n/, which he mixed up in speech also. I finally had to put a visual cue on them, saying 'm' was the "mountain letter" and you can drive cars between the mountains. And 'n' is the "nose letter", and it's one long nose. Now he is able to distinguish the two. The problem had been corrected in his speech a couple years ago by learning each word individually that he was getting wrong. Now he can distinguish them in reading as well, though he'll sometimes hesitate on those letters. It's a lot better than it was. :)

 

Anyway, go download some I See Sam books. The first 52 are free, and they're more interesting than Bob books. My 6 year old was able to read these at 4, and my 3.5 year old can read them. They are similar to Bob books, adding new sounds/words gradually. The first book has 2 or 3 words in it. You do need to teach the "ee" phonogram, as one of the first words is "see". My middle son had also learned that open syllables are long, via Webster's Speller, so words like "a", "the", and "I" were not "sight words". We sounded them out.

 

Again though, you'll need to practice practice practice those words. And it takes my middle son longer to get a word into memory than it takes his 3.5 year old brother. 3.5 year old sounds out a word in a Bob book, then he remembers it the next time he sees it in the book. Middle son had to sound it out even if it was on the same line of text as the previous time he sounded it out. But now after doing a lot of practice in Dancing Bears, he is remembering several words.He usually has to sound them out multiple times before he remembers them, but he's remembering them. :)

[Laura Corin]

My experience is that it seems as if if will never click, you are close to despair and then..... suddenly you are there. One day, Hobbes said to me, 'Mum, do I have to make each of the sounds before I say the word?'

 

Laura