DJ has taken a HUGE leap the past week and he is reading. Really, truly reading!  He received this set of Miss Rhonda Readers for Christmas last year. He’s been doing so well with the sound games lately, I decided to try an activity using one of the readers. 

I chose one of the books and pulled out a few key words for DJ to write with the movable alphabet. After he wrote those words, I then suggested we read the book together and he would read the words he had just written. Well, it gave him just the confidence he needed and he just took off reading!  Words we had written and words we hadn’t. 

We did it again with two more books and now with some help, he can read all of the Miss Rhonda Set 1 readers. And he’s excited about it. He tries to read a book to anyone who gets near him. 

So now that he’s reading, I have a whole bag full of tricks waiting for him. I printed and bound these little “word families” books for him.  There are 24 for books each which a set of 7-9 CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. This book has one long page with “ag” on is and then several short pages with t, b, s, l, etc. As you turn the pages, a new word is made. DJ enjoys these books but the challenge here is his limited vocabulary. Just because a word is easy to decode doesn’t mean it’s commonly used enough to be recognized. 

Next I’m mixing the Montessori Phonetic Object Box activity with the Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. Each lesson in OPGTR provides a list of phonetic words and then a little story using those words. So I found clip art pictures for each word. Then, in the Montessori activity you say to the child, “I’m thinking of one of these pictures but I’m not going to tell you. I’m just going to write it.”  So I wrote each of the words on little strips of paper and DJ matches them to the pictures. In this lesson, the words were fan, ran, man and included the name Dan – which was very convenient because my husband’s name is Dan. So I included a picture of him. 

Then for the little story, I found a picture of a fat cat and typed the story below it. So this will be my nightly activity for awhile – prepare the next OPGTR lesson for the next school day. 

In the meantime, as if that is not enough, DJ counted the Thousand Chain this week!  We had tried this a year ago and he just wasn’t ready to focus on such a big task. Even now, this was a huge challenge to keep him going and not give up. We both wanted to get to the end though so we pushed through and he was so thrilled to place that 1000 marker on the last bead!  

After he had finished labeling, I had him practice skip counting by 100s and 10s. Then we pulled out our place value dice – three 10-sided die with hundreds, tens and units – to randomly generate several 3-digit numbers. I wrote the numbers on slips of papers and then DJ found that particular bead in the chain. I had thought to only do a few but DJ loved this exercise and placed about a dozen white tickets along the chain. 

And even with all that advanced work, this boy still *loves* his cylinders.