T is for Trying to Read. Blogging through the alphabet

My son is an emerging reader.  It's been a bit of a road for us.  He struggles with hearing sounds... learning phonics was a bit of a bust for us, so we use reading kingdom as a daily activity...it's helping the best of everything we've done so far.  Love the program and he thinks it's fun as well.  :)   The most important thing is... it's doing the trick for him.  Nothing else I tried really worked and tried a variety of things but many them relied on a phonics approach and for my lad that just wasn't doing the job.. and that's my fall back position (how I learned) so it's hard to try to rethink it.

We're recently added reading for 20 minutes every day.   We have these readers from Science Life Cycle books that are subject oriented that take approximately 20 minutes to read with some talking time in the midst of it.    I was very impressed tonight with the lad's ability to read a book about "Chickens" tonight.

It's just so nice to see him improving.

We play a variety of word games when we can... anything from.. give me a noun, an adjective and a verb... okay.. can you read this story?   Many times they are funny which suits this humour filled 8 year old just fine.  :)

The other day I pulled out some letter tiles that I picked up from somewhere and I challenged him first... Can you make these magnetic words plural?

Then we started having fun with the tiles.  The intrigue of doing this wore off quickly.

I spelled a word...  and said.. so .. think you can change it to another word?
He did!
Then I changed it.
He changed it.

here he is, thinking a new word through...

That morphed into the lad trying to spell a word he thought he knew.  It was a fairly long word THUNDER.. he spelled it as tondir.. pretty close I said... but it's
TH... UN...D...ER... (I really really emphasized the sounds...and yeah.. that's me falling back on phonics).  :)   And together we spelled it correctly - but those TH's are hard you know.. when you can't really hear that h (so he tells me.. the "T" and "TH" sound the same.. Just like "F" sounds like T and TH.  He got Clan down quite easily after asking if it was a k or a c.  (good question eh?)

The cat warriors books are current favourites of the lad, so he spent the next 10-20 minutes making words from the book.. Like Kit, kits, hunt, claw, clan, mice, bugs, hunts

Then the lad asked... Mom.. do you think we have enough words to make a sentence?   Go ahead, try ... you won't know unless you do try.  :)  As you can see.. he succeeded!  WOOT WOOT!  :)

Berrykit is a funny little, very courageous kitten in the clan and the lad is just captivated by him and laughs at his antics often. He needed help spelling Berry but otherwise managed to do this on his own.

I am ever so pleased with how my lad is coming along.  I really really try hard not to be bothered by folks who critic and comment on how their child learned to read at age 31/2 or how they never even had to teach their child how to read.   Sometimes reading can be a challenge, and I'm so glad my boy is meeting this particular challenge in his life.

Come join with us as we blog through the alphabet over at Ben And Me.   This week we are working on the letter T.