man

Lacy and I have been working on reading together. She's learning the letters and their sounds, and today we started talking about blending. We're using the Rocket Phonics system, which is really fun for her because it has bingo. I say the letter sound and she covers the letter on the bingo chart. We work on a few letters at a time and then move on. We've been working on lesson one now for, oh, a year I think! But it's only now that I feel like she is mature enough to really follow through and begin reading. The letters we are working on are a, e, i, f, n, m, h, k, and l. She's learning them all in lower case because that's what you see more. She's having trouble with f (she always says it's a t), and h (it's too similar to n). the rest of them are usually no problem, though she can get confused with e and i sometimes too.

So anyway. We talked about blending and we got out the little rocket ship peeker and started reading the words using those above nine letters. It took a while for her to get the concept, so she didn't read "an" by herself. The next word, though, was man, and she sounded it out all by herself! It took a minute, but she got it! She was so proud of herself for reading a word! There's no turning back now-- she'll be reading books before I know it! Pretty soon I'm going to have to get some easy readers for her to read.