This is what Maddie's reading lessons look like. A friend of mine introduced me to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and Maddie will do lesson number 71 today! She is getting to be a good little reader and writer!
I have read mixed reviews of the book. So I will lay out some of the pros and cons to it that we have found.
Pros:
~This book is working well for us.
~ I really like how the book is laid out with prompts for exactly what the parent says (though I don't always follow it exactly) - this makes it easy for a first-time home-schooling mom!
~ It also seems to be written in a really great progression - it's working!
~ The child learns sounds before letter names - which makes sense to me - and is working even though Maddie knows her letter names by now.
~ Everything in the book is spelled properly and the letters that are silent are written smaller than the letters that are sounded.
Cons:
~ There are some typos, which you as the parent need to catch and help correct.
~ The rhyming exercises in the beginning are a bit - well - we ended up skipping them and things still went just fine. (Just our experience.)
~ There are a very few sounds that I have had to just come up with my own way to teach (like the sound 'o' makes in the word 'some').
Neither Pro nor Con - just thoughts:
I have added a bit to this by explaining that the letter which are not sounded in a word are 'helpers' to make the other letters say what they need to.
The whole book is black and white and red. I am getting a bit tired of that, but Maddie doesn't seem to mind. We read enough colorful story books the rest of the day to make up for it, I guess.
Maddie also sits down to write and draw just about every day. I love her art work!
This is a helicopter, drawn by Maddie for dadE (daddy). She doing very well with sounding out and writing what she wants to say. When she is working on tasks during her school time, I help her to spell things correctly, but when she sits down and comes up with something all on her own, I just smile about her sounded-spelling and know that there is lots of time to change 'dadE' into 'daddy' - she did just turn 5. And I certainly don't want her to stop trying and coloring and writing because she doesn't do it 'just right' the first time.
This is Tuesday, isn't it.
This is me. In my mirror.
Self-Portrait Tuesday.