Last year for reading lessons we used a set of books called Dash into Reading. The stories and illustrations are very cute and kid-friendly, and the first set was a good, low-key introduction to the very basics... but as we got into the second set I became more and more unhappy with the series. First of all, I kept finding mistakes in the order of what was taught, which made for an awkward experience for both learner and teacher. Second, I began to realize that the ways new concepts were taught were inadequate for a thorough learning experience and required too much extra planning on my part (the books are cute, but the suggested method for teaching is frankly very boring and I just can't settle for that). I began to notice that Anya was often of guessing based on the pictures in the book rather than truly decoding the words.
So, we finished out the second set at the end of kindergarten, but I was ready for something different this fall. The Gentle + Classical kindergarten curriculum we used had recommended something called All About Reading, so after doing some reading and thinking this summer, I decided to try it out. It is pretty much the exact opposite of Dash into Reading, which is what I wanted! I could tell from their website that Anya wasn't yet ready for the second set, as far as her fluency, but the first set basically started over at the beginning. Start over we did! And I'm so glad. It has been exactly what she needed to revisit the basics and relearn the short vowel sounds more thoroughly.
Some highlights:
Frying eggs
The activity book is full of simple and fun games, like the other day we fried paper eggs in a real frying pan--as she flipped them, she had to read the words on the other side. We pretended to preheat the pan, add oil, sprinkle salt, and then eat them. Every lesson has some sort of hands-on activity like this with paper cut-outs.
Hand signals
Each short vowel sound is taught with its own hand signal. For e, cup your hand at your ear and say echo. This combo of saying the sound out loud and pairing it with a movement has seemed to help her a lot.
Feed the monster
Many lessons use "practice sheets"--a page (and now more than a page) of words and phrases to read. Not super interesting but thankfully the teaching guide has a lot of ideas for making it more fun, and one of the favorites is to cut up the words and then feed them to this wild little monster! I pretend to be the hangry monster, and Anya reads the words before stuffing them into its mouth.
Sometimes she tends to read too fast and not actually look at each letter, and a silly game like "the monster will jump out and eat you if you read too fast!" makes her laugh and slow down. Once, I hid the monster in my teacher's book before the lesson, snuck it out while she was speeding along, and really got her with a big "rah! too fast! I will eat you!"
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