Consonants and reading...

For learning to read, we are still working on the consonants and Kai has shown alot more confidence in reading alot more of I CAN READ SERIES.

We are still looking at flashcards for new words and also at the Dolch List for Kai to help him become a confident reader. He loves reading aloud to us and I get him to read for me while we are working on his Language Lessons.

We are going really going slowly and also viewing Leapfrog DVDs, Starfalls websites and using Progress Phonics to help us masters the sound while we work using The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I am also learning together with Kai.

Reading and more reading...

We are into more reading and Kai would request to be read to more frequent. As we read, he would read after us and he has also started to spell out a lot of words on his own and looking at signboard, reading them out loud.

Really hope that this reading bug is going to last for a whole lifetime and that books would open up a lot of areas for him to learn about different places and cultures, the environment and more. I am getting really expected for him as we are reading more and more.

For our reading and phonics classes, Kai has requested to focus on all the consonants. So we are looking at all the consonsants and he was singing away the phonics song on his Leapfrog DVD.

Reading aloud on his own...

We are moving on to consonants sound and Kai started to read even more on his own now and besides reading Peter and Janes Series, Dora Phonics Series and Steps into Reading series. We discovered a new series by Oxford University Press (The Oxford Reading Tree - Read at Home Series).

And they are really interesting books with very interesting themes. Kai started to read aloud to me while I was cooking in the kitchen and he was really proud to do that on his own. I am glad that he founds the series interesting and funny. It is a nice series and there are questions at the end of the book to check the child's understanding of the story.




Book Titles and Reading Leaflet

1. Oxford Reading Tree

2. Books Titles

Reading and Comprehending...

These couple of days, we are reading more books as Kai requested for a 2 days break and it was a good break for me to as I am busy preparing food for some guests from Daddy's research centre. Both Kai and myself enjoyed reading and it was refreshing to reread some books.

We are working slowly and steady, making sure Kai understand what he is doing. And we also work on his comprehension skills. I am going through the first skill of comprehension with him, we are reading some non-fiction passages and newspaper articles together and I get him to tell me the main points of each paragraph. He enjoyed doing that as he felt he is a grown up and it also applied when we were watching the news.

Long Vowel Sounds...

We are moving into long vowel sound this week and taking our time to learn. We hope to be able to achieve all the sound by year-end and start with word blending and getting Kai ready to read as much as he wants to so that we can have a family time of reading together and complete silence in the house.

Daddy and I hope to be able to apply "DEAR" into our schedule. And that we will have a great time exploring books.

DEAR simply stands for "Drop Everything And Read".

So here we are looking at the long vowel sound starting from A a.

And Kai requested to read through Peter and Jane Book 3A again, we talked about the pictures
and discussed about things Kai enjoys doing.

After that, he went ahead to fix his new toys (Meccano), he had fun playing his new toys and spent his time thing and creating new design for his models and pretended to be the police officer and after that getting his Lego out and his other vehicles and role-playing.

More reading...

Kai has requested that we do not do much work for English today instead to read through what we have learnt for the past few lessons. To revisit, recap and to master them before moving on.

We spent the time, reading through what we have learnt, forming sentences, spotting and changing the casing for names to capital letter and looking at personal pronoun "I".

It was also a time that I could see how much Kai has learnt and I would say that we have progressed.

We spent the time looking through more books from the library and enjoyed ourselves reading.

Working on the Vowels

Language has never been my forte and it is not my cup of tea but here I am struck on teaching my little one, Phonics. I am very thankful for friends who have recommended me books and glad that one of the book that I have passed to another friend has been used productively.



Teaching Phonics was a real challenge for me since I am more of a Maths and Science person and I love Art. And here I am giving this task to accomplish as I know that it is important to give Kai the skills for decoding and encoding words besides teaching him the Dolch Lists, sightwords and even keywords. I have to say that we are learning Phonics together and most of the time he learnt it faster than me.



I am glad that that there are alot of websites, CDs and DVDs available that I can use to learn together with Kai. I have learnt not to rush and to go slow according to Kai's pace and it is his directed learning and I am a facilitator and to help when he is struck. So here we are learning the Long and Short Vowels sound of a, e, i, o and u.

It is not easy to explain to Kai that there are 26 letters in the Alphabets and that it can be written into both Capital letter and small letter but there are 44 sounds. Even up to today, I still saluate friends who major in English. Here I am struggling to teach Phonics and I am drawing from the Lord strength to learn and master it.

I look through the long and short vowel sounds through the website and learn to distinguish the sounds and came up learn that words that using the sound. It was a challenge for me and Kai was happy learning then. After doing this, Kai requested to watch his Leapfrog, "Letter Factory" and "Talking Word Factory" before we head out of the house for our daily nature walk.

Learning about Vowel Sounds

And since he was 3, he was so eager to learn to read that we started him on Leapfrog DVD on "The Letter Factory" where he picks up the sounds of each letters in a very short time. And he also enjoy going into the Starfall website to learn his phonics and to read the books.

We have been reading to Kai since we conceived him and it became a nature to read to him daily since the day he was borned. Kai loves books and he will quieten down once we start to read to him.

Finally, we decided to teach him formally to read beside doing the normal flashcards. I am teaching him using CM methods as well as partially from Classic Homeschooling Method. And after reading more about teaching to read, we have decided to teaching him phonics using "The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Reading". We are working on it slowly and not rush as I think that it is really important for him to comprehend what he is reading and enjoys reading.

As we have just relocated and our books have not arrived yet by shipment, we are revisiting all the vowel sounds and learning more about them each day. And Kai also loves to read books on Peter and Jane which helps him in keywords and sightwords.

I supposed the best gift a parent can give to a child is teaching him to read. I am praying hard that I will be effective in teaching Kai.