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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Mighty Reader

Whew, today we have a snow day. This is about our 4th or 5th snow day this year already. This winter has been so crazy with tons of snow and this time lots of ice. I took the opportunity today to do some video of some of the stuff I have made for Maggie for her reading. I stopped and counted the words on her ring and in 32 days she has learned to read 135 words. Just in one month's time!!! I am so very happy and impressed with her reading. We've found some small readers that she can read, and it really has made her more confident in herself. Lately I've found that Maggie has been shifting her preferences when it comes to reading. Some days she really enjoys her Your Baby Can Read videos. Other days she likes to look at the Powerpoint or Brillkids. Some days she likes to look at flashcards, and sometimes she likes to look at the Your Baby Can Read books. So today in the spirit of Snow day I took the time to video tape some of the items we have been using here at home for reading and math.I found that though making some of these things is time consuming they've all been very helpful in their own right.


I've also found that if your starting to teach your child to read at such a late age(4 and above) that you really need to be creative if you want to get them up and reading. One thing that I've also found with teaching a child this age is that they learn extremely quick. This maybe because they are still in that window where they learn quickly though. According to Glenn Doman that time is between ages birth to 6 yrs of age. I will admit it is amazing to see how much children at this age can do.

Even last night Maggie decided to tackle some of the book Green Eggs and Ham. We've been working on sight words lately because really all sentences are composed mostly of sight words. So I figured it would be helpful to teach these. I've used the list from the Kid 2020 website to cover all of the sight words that are taught between k and 3rd grade. The first set has about 6 lists of words and she's completed quite a few words from that already. Some where covered in the Your baby Can Read and some we've worked on with the card books that I've made.
She also was excited to watch her number 5 Your Baby Can Read DVD too. Its much longer then the rest of the DVD's. Its about 40 minutes long, but she sat and watched the whole thing. Her very favorite part of the DVD is the word games at the end. She loves the games at the end that ask them to find this work, or say that word , or touch this or that.


To end my journal entry here for today I want to share Maggie and I celebrating 100 days of school with her reading 135 words ( want everyone to know at the time I had counted 134 words but found there was one that had come off her ring, so she has 135! )

2 comments:

LM'sMum said...

Fantastic progress! Well done, Maggie!

I wonder if you have seen this resource for sight words:
http://www.uniqueteachingresources.com/Fry-1000-Instant-Words.html
and this one for phonics:
http://www.progressivephonics.com/

Instead of stapling my DIY books, I punch two holes and bind the pages with small rings (similar to the ones you use with flashcards), so they still look like books, but I can change the order of the pages or take out pages I don't want.

Tracy said...

Thanks so much for posting the sight word link. I know about Progressive phonics.
The sight word link is fantastic!