Every Waking Hour

I brought out our beginning phonics books yesterday in order to plan a bit for next year — 100 Easy Lessons and some sheets I made last year.

Paddy and Aidan both picked them up and started working on them and to my surprise, they had both gained ground since we “stopped” sometime in May. Aidan can sound out words easily though he still needs help blending them. Once I have “said it the slow way”, though, he is easily able to figure out what word I am saying, which is speech-training as well as phonics and was very difficult for him just a month or so ago.

Right now he is flipping through the worksheet pages and sounding out words at random. Our ritual is that he sounds it out “C–A—T”. Then I do the intermediate bit “cc–aaaa—ttt”. Then he says, with an air of great revelation, “CAT!!” Then, recently, I’ve been trying to use the word in a sentence just to make it “real” for him, that he has read a real word not just a collection of letters. It is very fun for both of us, but if I try to help him figure out how to do the middle stage for himself, he says, “Uh — I’ll do it myself!” So right now we’re sticking with the 4 part ritual.

Paddy is a different story. I think he could have been reading last year as far as , but I didn’t want to hasten it because he is still very butterfly-like in his attention span. He wants to just READ so he will guess wildly at a word just to keep going. However, he was easily able to get past lesson 20 in 100 Easy Lessons so I guess you could say that they are both reading at a very simple decoding level.

I am trying to keep notes on this because the literacy process is fascinating to me.