Saturday, September 3, 2011

About Early Reading

I am doing a wide variety of early reading activities with Nicholas. I plan to review the programs we are using in separate posts, but here is the general overview.

We have been using Little Reader from Brillkids for a couple of months now. It is designed to teach whole-word reading (i.e. memorizing each word separately) using fast flashing of the words and pictures. The most important thing about Little Reader for us is that Nikki loves it, and whether he is learning to read the words or not he is learning a lot of vocabulary!

We are also starting phonics (letter sounds). We use the Starfall website, as well as the animal alphabet phonics cards from our Threshold to Reading kit. We have watched the Leapfrog letter factory - it is too long to watch easily but we do like the letter sounds song, and use that with our letter flashcards.

The most important part of our early reading lessons is reading, reading, reading! We spend maybe 5 minutes a day on the other stuff, but none of that is important if you can't instill a love of reading and an appreciation for stories - the only way to do that is read lots of books!

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