Today's Reading Lesson...

I've been working with Cassia regularly on Easy Lessons for Teaching Word Families. We do this on a whiteboard, using one color of ink for the word family, and another for the starting letter(s). She loves this, and reads the words easily for the most part, even when I throw in blends, like the "cl" in "clock" today.

I also picked up Green Eggs and Ham at the library, and today we sat down and read through it together. She knows parts of it by memory, so she was able to "read" those parts. I sat down afterwards and made a word bank that I then printed in large font on card stock. I plan to cut these apart and go through 5 a day, in the fashion recommended in Home Education. For this, I will use the whiteboard too. I'll put a word on the board, go over it with her until she's comfortable with it, then ask her to find it in the pile of words for that day. Once she has all 5 down, she can play with them, making sentences, etc. The next day, we can review the words we covered the day before, then introduce 5 more. I am hoping that in 10 days, with this method, she will be able to read the entire book comfortably, since there are only 50 words in the entire book, including "a" and "I". This book was a benchmark in our home before, when I was teaching Cyrus to read. After he could read Green Eggs and Ham fluently, he was easily able to move on to other books, such as his beloved Calvin and Hobbes. I think Cassia may just move on to other beginner books, but believe me, this will be a major milestone in our house!

I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and it is so exciting!