Breakthrough!

As most of you know, I began teaching Sean letters, words, and phonetic sounds very early on (I think as soon as he could walk--though with hindsight I could have started much earlier). I used a combination of many methods, much of them tactile and hands-on (such as tracing letters in rice/sand). Now Sean has progressed to reading short chapter books on his own (such as Frog and Toad).

I don't really know why, but I didn't begin so early with Katie (maybe it was something to do with having less one-on-one time with her and feeling more exhausted and overwhelmed with two kids than with one!). However, I have been working consistently with her for a while now by reading aloud to her, using flash cards, and doing lots of pre-reading activities that are made to train her brain to process things from left to right (see Barabara Curtis' book Mommy Teach Me! for more info). She is now able to, with a few exceptions and some mistakes, say the phonetic sound that each letter in the alphabet makes. So, I decided to have her try to mash together three phonetic sounds into a word today. I tried this about two weeks ago and she didn't get it then, but today she did!! I used alphabet cookies from Trader Joe's:

Then I chose three letters and spaced them out considerably. The first letters were C-A-T (the cookies only come in capitals). Immediately she called out the letters, and after being asked, she said each of their sounds. We then spent a couple minutes saying each sound as we pointed to the corresponding cookie, gradually moving the sounds (and the cookies) closer together. And, as she and I said the word slowly (c-a-a-a-a-a-t) she got it. Her face lit up and she turned to me and said: cat! I then tried it again just to make sure that it wasn't some fluke, and the same thing happened with the word dog.


It was great! If I remember correctly, this is the same way that Sean learned to read his first word--with cookies. (You see, there is great incentive because they get to eat them at the end--far better than magnetic letters!)