Preschool Plans 2013-2014: Beginner Reader

I'm working on adapting our learning time more around Littlemiss's interests and needs for this next year. She has shown a strong interest in reading and has mastered her pre-reading skills that signify she may be ready to begin learning to read. She identifies all the letters and their sounds, can easily identify the beginning sounds of words, and has naturally begun to blend sounds together. I had put off teaching her reading for awhile, but tried something new this week. I say tried, because it is ok if she is not ready to read. I tested the waters a bit to see where she is challenged in an enjoyable way, but not overwhelmed.

I first researched different methods for teaching reading. I looked at some curriculum's, but wasn't comfortable teaching her through worksheets and sit down work at her age. I know she, and typical kids, learn best from hands-on learning, so when I teach her at home my goal is to make it as hands-on as possible. Montessori teaching of reading/language has a very hands-on approach that is more natural for the younger child in my opinion. I think it will work best for Littlemiss at her age and ability, outlined here on discovery kidzone Montessori Adventures blog. I like it because it divides the letters into sound sets. The sound sets are used to introduce certain letters together and build words with. I purchased the Beginner set of Bob Books just in case she was ready this week because they correlate with the sound sets. After working through the first sound set a few times she was reading the first two books with help! It was magical! And she LOVES reading. I know she could quickly learn to read the other books in the set, but I'm purposefully keeping her from them until I introduce those sound sets to make sure she has a firm grasp of all the words in the different sound sets. She still needs some work with the first sound set to make sure she can spell and sound out (read) all the word combinations well and with ease, so we will continue with different activities to strengthen this sound set initially.

I will soon be purchasing the Montessori wooden letters used for teaching reading/language for preschool. For now I used letters from another letter game we have. I didn't have pictures to go with each word, so I begun by saying a word and then saying it in a sentence. For example, "sat," "I sat." "How do you spell the word 'sat'?" If she struggled I would ask, "what beginning letter sound do you hear?" Or slowly sounding out the word so she could hear the letters in the middle and end. "Ssss-aaa-ttt" 

Since the "-at" word family was a part of the first letter set, we worked on adding the beginning sound to spell the words.

The first time we worked together, I could see her mind working so hard. She really had to think to sound out the words and spell them. The first reading session lasted less than 5 minutes, and she wanted to play on the Bob Books app on my I-pad. She reached a point of frustration and fringed on the edge of her ZPD (zone of proximal development). She had been challenged and needed a bit of a break.

This is the lite/free version of the app. We may upgrade soon if she continues to learn from it. 

It was basically teaching her the same skills, except spelling with more letters than in our letter set.

We sat down a few more times to spell out the words. She did really well. Above you can see that we were working on spelling "mat," "sat," & "pat." Getting her familiar with the ending sound "-at."

This was a great assessment of her reading readiness that is guiding my planning for teaching her reading for Preschool 2013-2014. I will continue where we left off for her preschool at the beginning of September, but with more hands on activities I gathered online. This is probably the most excited I've been watching her learn. I can't wait to watch her read books for enjoyment!