DJ has been in love with sound games lately and is asking to play them all.the.time! It is so much fun but they don’t really lend themselves to photos so I don’t have many pictures.

He has mastered beginning and ending sounds and we’ve been working on middle sounds and parsing all sounds in a word. Recently he came to me with some yellow playdough and said, “We haven’t done yellow yet!” So we worked through the sounds y – e – l – oh.

We went on a drive a few days ago and I decided to do a test of all beginning sounds to see if he had any gaps. He got them all except for e, o and z. But it was so funny how it played out. For some reason he decided to play like this:

Me: What sound does apple start with?
Him: I don’t know what apple starts with.
Me: Listen… apple
Him: That means it starts with a.
Me: What sound does ball start with?
Him: I don’t know what ball starts with.
Me: Listen… ball
Him: That means it starts with b.

And on and on throughout the entire alphabet. Silly boy.

He learned three new sandpaper letters last week. This one, ai, is the long-a sound. The objects I have are acorn, airplane, ace, apron, paint & train. The Alphatales book includes all pronunciations of A so I read it again this time downplaying the short-a words and emphasizing long-a.

We also did b this week including bottle, bat, bandaid, boat, battery, bell, bee, banana, bread and basketball. DJ doesn’t seem to have any trouble identifying both cursive and print letters as b’s even though they look quite a bit different. He also readily identifies both cursive and print letter f, which also are rather distinct to me. But we does struggle with print b, d, p, h & q getting them all mixed up. So I’m really glad that I chose to start with cursive.

Finally we did the letter l, including lion, lip balm, label, lightbulb, license, leopard, lettuce, log & ladybug.

We are about two-thirds of the way through the single sandpaper letters but still have most of the double letters to do. The letters we haven’t done are g i j k u v x y & z and all the green doubles except for th & ai.

In addition to letter work, DJ chose some old favorite pre-reading work. Here he is ordering these 3-sequence story cards. These are fairly easy for him to order but he’s also getting really good at telling the story once they’re in sequence.

He then moved on to the 4-sequence story cards which used to be hard and frustrating for him. This time he ordered them with no problems and here you see he’s gone back to tell the stories again, pointing to each card as he narrates.

Then he matched some opposites cards.

And did some of these rhyming cards.

Oh! He was given this remote control car recently which gave him the idea to go through our “parts of a car” cards to match to the new car. (*Ahem* I just noticed the Pink Tower toppled in the background. Oops).

And finally DJ has been nuts about jigsaw puzzles lately and he’s getting really good at them!