k has been increasingly interested in literacy. we have encouraged her to begin by trying to recognize not only the upper case letters but also lower case letters. our last meeting with her preschool teacher indicated that they were all working on this and that she was entering a phase of wanting to write her name, her friends' names, and various words.
we have not pressed her to read recently as she gets angry when she does not know how to do things. so she has to be approached gently and usually encouraged when she is initiating a new stage. we have built on her interest in names and that she can sight read various names. we also know that she has memorized a few spellings: N-O, G-O, and C-A-T are ones that she can recognize easily. when i introduced some BOB books to her a few weeks ago, she was frustrated and angry that it was hard to read them, so i put them aside for a few days. instead we have been searching for these familiar words in stories that we read every night.
tonight while r was doing his weekly sight words on index cards, i thought she might enjoy her own reading words. i first just spelled C-A-T. and she immediately knew that was cat. then i asked her what M-A-T spelled. and she carefully sounded out each letter and said with joy , "mat. it spells mat!" i continued with S-A-T, B-A-T, R-A-T, F-A-T, and A-T. she got them all right. i then put them on index cards and showed them to her. she sat there and with some help sounded them out and read the words. she was so excited. we then expanded the set and i switched to am and Sam. this immediately frustrated her. So we went back to sounding things out and she accepted the prompting. We then added the A-D family; for some reason these were easy for her. For the next 15 minutes we worked on various short a words that she was able to sound out, more or less, by herself. i wrote them out on index cards and she went through them one by one. She read over 2 dozen words tonight. While she still easily gets angry if she makes a mistake, her desire to read the words was stronger and she did not give up.
I threw in a few tricky ones. I showed her M-E and then gave her H-E without assistance. and she figured it out. She also was very animated when she go to M-E again. She stood up and said "Me. I can be Barack Obama." Well who knew that the kiddo wanted to be president? But, yes. Literacy is a path to citizenship (as African American narratives attest).
It was an exciting evening.
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