School time

Caroline and I moved on from the "at" words to "an" words today. She did pretty good. We even went back over a couple combinations that exist in both (ex: cat/can) just to make sure she's getting the difference.

I thought I'd record what we are doing for anyone that's interested and for my future reference.

The day I introduce a new word family, we get out her magnet letters and tray.
We go over the phonogram "at."
Then we add the five different first letters for the words that go with our worksheets (cat, mat, rat, hat, bat) and sound them out.
Then I make flashcards for the five words and phonogram. (Today we even got a "can" out of the pantry and a "pan" out of the cabinet, which was fun for Caroline while I was writing the cards.)
Then we do the draw a line to the picture worksheet talking through the pictures (she might not know what some of the pictures are supposed to represent - like mat).

That's day 1.

Then, we do two activities per day until we've mastered it.
- flashcards
- draw a line to the picture worksheet (which she can do all by herself... I think we did the "at" worksheet seven times)
- fill in the blank to make the word worksheet (which I've modified by letting her cut the letters from a strip of paper and glue them on the blanks with a glue stick)
- a related craft (we made a toilet paper tube cat that I found through a website link)

In addition to those activities, we are usually doing a couple workbook pages. All of that only takes 15 minutes, which we time so she'll sit still and be rewarded with 15 minutes of computer time.

I also have her write a "C" on the name line of each worksheet we do. Honestly, she could probably write her whole name, but she makes too much a fuss about it. Lately, when she starts writing her name, she gets the "ca" done and then decides to write "cat" (she probably realizes it's shorter).

I just picked up "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons" from my library and I am waiting for a set of the Bob Books. We'll see what I learn from those.