Wednesday, July 4, 2012

learning to read


Lou went to reading camp a few weeks ago and it was just what he needed to pull things from school together with what we've been working on at home with some new skills they gave him.  His kindergarten program for next year puts it on for the kids.  It's 2 weeks longs, mornings only.  It was just what we needed.  I've talked about the reading program in kindergarten and first grade at our school before.  They use Abeka and some of the marking of vowels and special sounds confuse me.  You can't argue with the results though.
 

He knew his letter and most of the letter sounds, but he can sound out CVC words now.  It's just putting it all together.  It's about the most exciting thing ever!  One things that I really liked about the program is that they sent home really nice activities for us to do at home.  Each activity came with directions on how to use it a number of ways.  

My favorite was this 'letter factory.'  The go and stop signs encourage the blending together of the sounds.  I don't know what program it's from, but you could make something similar up on your own easily.

Here are some others favorite cvc activities that are not from camp but we are using at home.  I love this writing activity from Of Primary Importance.  I laminated them and we've been using them with a dry erase marker. I love hearing him sound out the words to figure out what letter goes in the boxes.


This is from Have From Teaching.  They have dozens of great printable. 


This cvc wheel is from Free Sweet Printables.


Our favorite blends chart is from Castles and Crayons.   This link is to the blog, she gives you a link to her TPT shop, where the chart is free. She also has an alphabet chart that I've used with my preschool class.



Lou's shy about this reading, but I'm going to try to get him on video doing some reading.  You might not be as excited as me about it, but it's pretty good stuff.


2 comments:

JoAnna said...

The reading teacher in me is very distressed that this book says that sack, bag and pan all have the same vowel sound. And that bed, yell and leg do. Or was it just so he could see the a in each and the e in each? Hmmm. I've never heard of this vowel marking system either.

Danielle said...

We have been working on reading with Alyssa using "100 Easy Lessons". We used up to lesson 62 and stopped because we hadn't seen much of an improvement in her reading skills during the past 10 lessons. Instead, we just started reading easy readers with her. We have definitely seen an improvement and want her to be reading well before 4 year old Preschool starts. Then it will be on to start reading lessons with Malachi!