Third post in a series. See here for: Part I. Part II.
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In the last post, I started writing about the materials I use, and explained just one: a set of large phoneme flashcards, optionally made with textured letters (like "sandpaper letters" but including some digraphs like "ee", "ai", "th", etc.)
The blog series would have been more tightly organized had I hit "save draft" instead of "publish," and continued by adding this material to the bottom of the previous post. Instead, I am publishing the bits as I write them here. I'm trying to restart the blogging habit by intentionally beginning a long and easy-to-write series. Bear with me.
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So, more materials today.
Item 2. "Progressive" lists of words prepared in advance.
We'll get to the content of these progressive lists, specifically, later in the series. Also, why I call them progressive. For now I want to make two points:
First, that this packet of word lists is ready to go as a prepared material. On a given day I can pick up my packet, flip to the page where I left off, and choose reading-practice words from the current list. When it's time to teach a new sound, I move on to the next list. This keeps me from having to think what to teach on the fly.
(I don't like to think on the fly what to teach much, because it requires a lot of my attention and self-discipline to interact positively with children, unless they are having a really good day.)
Second, it's a good place to point out that the majority of the time early on, I'm asking children to read individual words. I don't rely on a regular diet of early reader books, at least not in the very beginning. Those are available (you'll see the readers coming up in my materials list), but it's not the bread and butter of my program. My kids have always been frustrated by the process of slowly struggling through a sentence one sound at a time. If, by the time you've made it through one word, you've forgotten the previous word, you're not going to be really engaged with the text. So -- while we dip into sentences and stories now and again -- I concentrate on word lists until decoding is more rapid.
Item 3. Large magnetic slates with attached stylus.
Two common brands of magnetic slate are Doodle Pro® and Magna Doodle®. The larger the size, the better, for this application. The orange one on the bottom in the photo is a Doodle Pro®.
At the beginning of this school year I went to a Learning Resources brick-and-mortar store in my town and found the blue slate with the primary-handwriting lines permanently scribed on it. I really like this one. I wish I'd bought a couple of them; maybe I'll return to the store, because for the life of me I can't find it online. If you wanted to make your own from a blank magnet slate, I'm thinking that red and blue Sharpies would do the trick.
So, I use the magnet slate to write the words for the child to read, and sometimes the child uses the slate to spell. This is so much less wasteful than paper, and so much less messy than dry-erase boards. I love it. Write the word, read the word, wipe the word, and move on.
It's also easier for a child to write with the stylus than to write with pencil and paper. Mind you, this means that you're not really working on the pencil-holding, pencil-pushing skill at the same time, if that was your goal; but I'm all about reducing frustrations here, and if your child is ready to read before he is ready to manage a pencil and paper, I say let's go ahead with the reading. The pencil can wait.
Item 4. A set of phonics readers.
Pictured above: Bob Books®. (You might prefer to use something else.)
I know, I just got done saying that I mostly teach decoding using word lists. But I do use readers sparingly, and more and more frequently as the child either (a) asks for them or (b) appears to show readiness for sentences of the length in the books. It's the kind of thing that I pull out once in a while when we get a little tired of word lists, or when it seems like a good idea to remind the child of the point of this whole exercise. Also, you need at least a little bit of practice with things like going left to right, noticing the capital letters and periods that denote sentences, turning pages, and the like.
No set of readers is perfect, and I think that many different sets will work with my plan. There are, I think, two features to be avoided.
Feature to avoid, number one: an over-reliance on "sight word" reading. These are words that the child is supposed to learn to recognize from memory, on sight, without decoding. Ideally, especially early on, the child will encounter zero words that he does not yet have the skills to decode. We are going for phonics, as pure as possible.
Practically speaking, that's difficult to arrange. It's really hard to write a story that sounds okay but doesn't contain the word "the." (Though not impossible, as you will see.) In my experience, kids can deal with one or two of these here and there, so it isn't a deal-breaker. The Bob Books use "the" and "O.K." fairly early on, and I just tell the child what the word is and we move on.
Feature to avoid, number two: Over-emphasis on alphabetic order and/or the initial letters of words. There's no good reason for the most prominent feature of your readers to be "Here are a lot of words that begin with the letter A" followed by "Here are a lot of words that begin with the letter B" and so on. Later this can be useful for teaching capital letters, but really, the order of the alphabet is not germane to decoding, and the initial letter of words is a red herring.
Again, there are lots of reader sets out there that I think would work. I have seen, and like, the BRI readers (you can see them here -- I'm a little confused about how you obtain them, though). I know a lot of people like the Little Stories for Little Folks, sold by Catholic Heritage Curricula, and I think those would work.
I am pretty sold on Bob Books, though. They are inexpensive, widely available, appealing, and small (nice for little hands). They come in progressive sets (so you can buy them 8-10 at a time) and within each set, the order you use them in isn't all that important. You don't need to do a lot of research on them, just buy and use.
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More materials to come in another post.
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