Rychen reading

Rychen is now reading! Really reading! It is way fun. For a while he has been sounding out the easy 3-letter words, when I initiate it and ask him what it says. But now he is finding words out in public places and telling me what they say! He totally caught me by surprise one day last week in the car. He was holding a frisbee that had some words on it, and suddenly said "Mom, this says FREEDOM!" Wow, I said, "That's a seven-letter word! I can't believe it!" But that's a great phonetic 7-letter word. He is doing mostly easy words (phonetic), but we are also focusing on the concept of the silent "e" at the end, making the vowel long sound. He can recognize those words now without me reminding him about the silent "e."

 

I have a friend who used to teach reading to elementary school kids, and she is lending us some books. They have basic sentences that repeat on every page, with one word changing, so the child practices those words over and over. It also helps them guess the difficult words by looking at the pictures.

 

We've been doing reading and other phonics games every day when Elisabeth takes her nap. For literature we've been focusing on Nursery Rhymes and classic tales, like Hans Christian Anderson, fairy tales, etc. Here are some games we do. With the nursery rhymes, I say a line except for the last word and he fills it in (from memory). And with phonics, we do "I spy...something that starts with the letter P" and then he finds that object in the room. Or the rhyming game, that is easy. You can also start with a word and then they say a word starting with the same sound, etc.

 

But Rychen's favorite game is guessing numbers. Just guessing the number they're thinking of, and saying "higher" or "lower." He asks me to play this game several times a day! I think of numbers as we go, so I can manipulate the game and alternate my higher's and lower's, getting him to think of his number sequence (i.e. it's bigger than 26 but less than 47). His are easy - he likes to do 1,000 or 1 million. The "cool" numbers, you know :)