We have some exciting news for you!!

JayBird is sharing with everyone that "We have some exciting news for you!! I was reading Hop on Pop!" That's right...JayBird is reading!! We have been going through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons the past two weeks. We were just going through lesson 7 and quickly combined some lessons through to the end of lesson 11. Then I asked him to get the Hop on Pop book and sure enough, he could read from it! Truly amazing since we have only been practicing our reading for two weeks! (I promise he was also excited, despite the looks of his picture here.)

JayBird has been interested in learning to read and would do very well with our lessons until the last few minutes of each lesson, even though the lessons are very short. On average, they are suppose to take 15 minutes, but could take as long as 20 minutes or as little as 10 minutes. Ours generally take 10-15 minutes depending on if we do everything within each task and how squirmy JayBird is. Each lesson is broken into 6-8 tasks. Examples of the various tasks are learning new sounds, saying things fast and slow, and rhyming. Even in just the first two lessons I could see a difference in how he would sound words out. Instead of pausing in between sounds and saying "pih-ih-guh...pihihguh?? What's that?" he learned to instead smoothly sound out "piiig...pig!"

JayBird would do great on each day's lesson until the last couple of tasks when he would then be ready to be done. But together we persevered and would finish the lesson. When doing lesson 7, some sounds were put together for the first time to form words. This was very exciting for JayBird! He wanted to go on and do more and read more words, which prompted us to combine lessons 7 through 11, which had a lot of repetition that we skimmed over (too much repetition and review for his desire) and just a few new things, like putting already learned sounds together to form new words.

It is so wonderful to see this progress so soon. Exciting for me as a mom and encouraging for JayBird as an early reader! So Hop on Pop goes down as his first book, which interestingly, is the first book his Dad ever read as an early reader too. Like father like son.

 

Into my readers’ hearts:

~ What was your child’s “first book”?

~ What (very) early reader books, such as Bob books, have you loved? Share your links and resources, especially if you know any free online resources!