ReadingMama1214 Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 We are currently taking a break from Ordinary Parents Guide to Reading to work on blending and fluency. In OPGTR we are on lesson 54 at the beginning of the section on digraphs. DD did well with the consonant blends and can read the word, but her blending is choppy. She says /bl/ /a/ /ck/ instead of blaaaack or /j/ /i/ /g/ instead of jiiiig. She gets the words right and isn't guessing, but it is very choppy. Occasionally she will read a word right away and usually its a CVC word she has had lot of exposure to. We have Elizabeth's concentration game and are buddy reading lots of BOB books (we have the first 2 collections from Costco) and Progressive Phonics books. We aren't moving ahead in OPGTR until next week or the week after because I want to work on the blending. I know part of it is age and DD is young. She can orally blend so if I say a word slowly, she immediately says it fast/regular. Any favorite games or activities that you have to work on blending? I was thinking of making a racetrack for her today that has a lot of CVC, CVCC, and some CCVCC words on it for her to race over. I think once she can smoothly blend, her reading will take off and be more enjoyable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FO4UR Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 You are smart to sit tight and keep working on fluency before pushing forward. Fluency doesn't have to be perfect before moving on, but it should flow fairly smoothly before adding multi-letter phonograms into the mix. Some ideas... Use a cursor to uncover one sound at a time as you read. Take a 3x5 index card and cut a small notch out of the top/left corner to make the cursor. I prefer a pastel color card. Do this a LOT! Play word games on the board. Review words/patterns by writing one sound at a time, having her say it as she sees it. Make a list of these words at the top of the board. Then play hangman with the words, the traditional hangman. Hide 3-5 letter magnets around the room. She has to find the magnets and unscramble to make a word. (Obviously, you choose the words and pick the magnets accordingly.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverMoon Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 My little guy was at the exact same place in December. He turned 5 in September, and this is technically his pre-k year. The blending song in Sing, Spell, Read, & Write was just frustrating him. It has a ferris wheel with vowels on the baskets. A letter card is moved around it blending with each vowel, sa, se, si, so, su, su, so, si, se, sa, and so on. The workbook also expected some blending and he was in over his head. We put it aside and reverse engineered the BOB Books instead. I'd make a list of every word in the first BOB Book and he'd try to spell them on a Boogie Board (electronic white board). I enunciated the sounds and helped him break them apart as much as he needed. Then he'd work on reading the book. It took us two weeks of this for him to comfortably read book 1. By the time he got through book 6 he was blending really well, and SSRW was fun again. Now he does SSRW and a BOB Book or two daily, and he's picking up speed in both. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ReadingMama1214 Posted January 29, 2016 Author Share Posted January 29, 2016 You are smart to sit tight and keep working on fluency before pushing forward. Fluency doesn't have to be perfect before moving on, but it should flow fairly smoothly before adding multi-letter phonograms into the mix. Some ideas... Use a cursor to uncover one sound at a time as you read. Take a 3x5 index card and cut a small notch out of the top/left corner to make the cursor. I prefer a pastel color card. Do this a LOT! Play word games on the board. Review words/patterns by writing one sound at a time, having her say it as she sees it. Make a list of these words at the top of the board. Then play hangman with the words, the traditional hangman. Hide 3-5 letter magnets around the room. She has to find the magnets and unscramble to make a word. (Obviously, you choose the words and pick the magnets accordingly.) We do cover each letter/blend in a word for OPGTR. It's what the program suggests. I love the hidden letter game idea. I think we will try that today! Yes, I don't expect perfection before moving forward, but I do want her blending to improve some. So if it takes a couple of weeks, that's fine with me. I think improving her blending will boost her confidence (and make reading aloud a lot easier!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ReadingMama1214 Posted January 29, 2016 Author Share Posted January 29, 2016 We played race car blending today and she did great. It seems as if our break from new material has helped this week. I drew a track on a large piece of paper and wrote words every few inches and had her drive over them. I've also been more diligent about correcting choppy blending. I'm thinking we will take next week for review as well and then reassess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Camy-7 boybarians 1 lady Posted January 31, 2016 Share Posted January 31, 2016 Have you seen Phonics Pathways? It is chock full of excellent blending instruction! Blessings! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ReadingMama1214 Posted January 31, 2016 Author Share Posted January 31, 2016 (edited) Have you seen Phonics Pathways? It is chock full of excellent blending instruction! Blessings! I've seen it recommended. Is there a free version online? I don't want to buy another book and our library doesn't have it :(. But I can interlibrary loan it. She's actually improved this week when we talked about "holding our letters together" and have played some games with blending and we've been on break from formal lessons this week and just doing fun Bob books or progressive phonics. She's also been just reading words such as "pop, was, bob, pup, dog" etc without having to sound them out. So i think maybe she was blending in her head as well Edited January 31, 2016 by ReadingMama1214 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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