I decided a couple of weeks ago to try to do one reading activity with E(3) per day (she spends the vast majority of her time playing pretend and looking at books). E LOVES these reading activities, and after just a couple of days, she actually started reading! It clicked for her suddenly, and she is SO excited and proud!
These initial consonant cards are one of her favorite works to choose from her shelf. She has been choosing this work for a few months and always does well with it. I love it because it has a self-checking feature, so she can do it completely idependently.
To do this work, she labels the picture and puts her finger in the hole of the correct initial consonant. She then turns the card over to see if she is right. Fun!
After E(3) figured out how to put the sounds together to read the words, I wrote several word family words with chalk in the driveway. I "hopped" her from one letter to the next as she said each sound. Then I plopped her down, and she shouted the word. So much fun!
I then wrote a sentence and she stepped on each word as she read it. She was a little distracted at this point and wasn't that into this activity, but this is definitely something we'll do again soon. She LOVES reading the first 4 BOB books, so I plan to write sentences from these books for her to read.
It's really important to me that she spend most of her time playing pretend, playing outside, and listening to/looking at books. We spend 15 minutes at the very most on reading activities a day, and we don't work on this everyday. In contrast, she spent 6 hours outside yesterday playing pretend, climbing, running, walking, exploring, collecting treasures (rocks, fossils, pine straw, dried mud), and experiencing the world.
