Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Taking Some Stress out of Reading Real Books

J-jo does not like pushing himself to do things at which he may fail.  He's the kid who would rather scribble than color inside the lines, not because he can't do it, but because he is unhappy with himself when the coloring goes out of the lines even a little bit.  He is also the kid who won't write letters on paper at all (though he can trace them all in the salt tray) because they don't look the way he imagines them in his head.

Consequently, learning to read has been a bit of a road block, especially if he can't blend on the first try.  Getting him to read a book (we're using I Can Read It! Book 1 a Sonlight reader) is impossible, because it is a book!  That is, it is long, more than a word (even though I know he can sound them out if he just tried!)

He was happy to read single words written on a card.   I noticed that after reading all the Sam words (Bob book) on cards (in our learning dice), he could read the Sam book much more easily, so I decided to make cards for all the words in the first story in I Can Read It! Book 1.  I thought I would put them in the dice as well, since he seemed to like throwing it.

However, he still balked at reading the story in the book, in spite of having read each word on his own.  So I wrote a few extra words, and set up the cards to read as sentences and voila! J-jo was reading the book, without thinking he was reading a book.
We've worked through two and a half stories in this way.  I've been writing them by hand - it's faster for me than trying to fiddle on the computer, though I'd love to make printable cards of all the words in this book.

I'm happy that he no longer needs to sound out these words when he gets to them in subsequent stories.  It's so exciting to see a child get the hang of reading.

What tricks do you have to help new readers?
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3 comments:

  1. bugDecember 13, 2012 at 2:23 AM

    Brilliant! I love it!

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  2. amymJanuary 7, 2013 at 2:47 PM

    My 5 year old is similar. He gets overwhelmed when I ask him to read a story out of a reader, but if I write out the story one sentence at a time (I used to have to write it out one word at a time) on our white board, he will read it with much greater ease. So currently I am writing each sentence out and once he reads the sentence or two belonging to each photo in the story, his reward is to see the cooresponding picture in the book. I am trying to work him up to reading out of the reader by putting the bookmark in at the end of the short story so he can see the end in sight and know the story only goes as far as the bookmark.
    He has no problem if he is asked to read a 'Bob' book or one of the little 'Fun Tales' (Sonlight) books because they are smaller and less overwhelming.
    He is the same way with workbooks. I either photocopy workbooks or cut them apart so he only gets one or two pages at a time. I am photocopying his Math Book. I think when we get to the next level, I'll undo the binding instead.

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  3. The girl who painted treesJanuary 7, 2013 at 6:59 PM

    @ amym - I love your idea of taking apart the workbooks to make it look like less:)

    ReplyDelete