Learning to Read!

I initially took a break from blogging when Aislin began a new learning adventure--reading! I decided to try a  curriculum developed by a former elementary school teacher/current stay-at-home mom, and it's called Ready2Read. I looked through as much of the material as I could before purchasing Level 1: Unit 1 (only $5 via teachersnotebook.com for about 40 pages worth of material), and I felt like it would be a good fit for my daughter. So I downloaded the unit and printed off the first week's activities. I had decided, since using this curriculum was really an experiment, having had no previous experience with it nor feedback from friends who've used it, that I would wait until the end of the first week before blogging about the results!

Let me first show with pictures before words...

 Color-by-number flashcards (I, see, the, and, a)

 Great thing about these flashcards is that you can put objects between them to make a complete sentence. For instance, "I see the dinosaur and a crayon." 

Aislin loved that she was able to read complete sentences!

Cherrio/decorating mats

We used sprinkles...which clearly didn't get us too far in this activity LOL! As fun as it was to use food, I think I'll try laminating them (as instructed, but I was too lazy to get that done!) and doing something like q-tip dots with washable paint or using removable stickers. 

Finally, let me show you with a video taken at the end of the week (via dropbox.com, since blogger has been giving me a hard time uploading videos)...

AISLIN READING :)

My conclusion: this experiment has been a wonderful success :) I really appreciated the schedule provided with this curriculum because I already felt pretty timid about starting this new adventure. Instead of jumping into it, I really crept and tried to get a feel for it with my big toe. But the schedule allowed for a number of different activities to keep her busy each day, and half of those things were review. 

There were definitely times when we had to switch things up a bit (after I had learned what she enjoyed more and what she felt wary of), and there were times when we had to shorten the schedule for the day so it wouldn't be too much, but she got through it. 

The mini-books (reviewing -at and -an words) were a big hit with her. I think they made her feel very grown up because she was reading from books and not just bits of paper. Another big hit was the STARFALL website listed on the schedule for the end of week one. It has fun activities and games on the same word families she had just learned about! 

Like I said, I had initially taken a break from blogging so I could test this experiment. However, this post should have been written and published about two weeks ago! Since then we've been busy with Halloween stuff (which shall be on another post), but now that Halloween's over...I think we'll move on to Unit 2!

I'll let you know how that experiment goes ;)