Reading progress

Remembering that the primary purpose of this blog is to give us a place to track Elena's academic development...

Elena has lately been reading Bob books. The first series of Bob books makes a whole story using only short vowels, which are largely in her grasp now.

She has also been loving going to Starfall.com and doing the reading activities there. Lately, we have been working on the idea that sometimes letters don't make the sounds she's used to, focusing on what happens when a silent E is added ("rat" versus "rate"). She has had a difficult time making this leap, but yesterday, she made significant progress with this and was able to do a number of silent E words in the Jake's Tale story. "Find the silent E!" has now become a fun game for her. And it helps that starfall has a nice song for each one ("The silent E at the end of a word makes the [letter name] say [long vowel sound]" to the tune of "Here we go round the mulberry bush").

Elena has also recently picked up on of her Spanish language books and was going through it with me. She would ask "What's 'dog' in Spanish?" when looking at a picture of a dog and I would suggest sounding out the Spanish word to find out. It seemed to make a fun detective game that she was largely able to solve herself. This is not at all the sort of language immersion that I would have hoped for, but she is at least starting to learn that everything has a name in other languages. It's also an interesting multicultural compentency exercise for her: sometimes, she will give me a book to read to her that's in Spanish or Italian, but when I start to read it in the language in which it's written, she'll say "No! Don't read it in a language, just read it normal!" Lately I've been trying to explain that what she speaks is a language, too, just like Spanish and Italian. It seems to be sinking in, at least to some extent, though it's hard for her to understand that English, which comes so easily to her now, could be equivalent to another language.