Hannah has had a FR at home for the past couple of weeks. She is really finding the second half of the book difficult - it has all the rhyming words - cat, fat, sat, bat, rat, hat in it - introducing them one or two at a time but eventually using them all in a sentence. Hannah seems to really struggle then - she doens't seem to be able to tel the difference between them so well. I have tried showing her how to sound them out 'c-at' etc but I am not sure that that was working that well - I need her to enjoy learning to read - she relaly lvoes books and reading so I don't want to lose that. I then helped her to draw the cover page - a big fat cat and then I got ehr to cut out the words of the title and sequence them and then paste them onto her picture which she really enjoyed. I made the book into a powerpoint presentation - where I tried to emphasise particular words - eg I underline sat each time it appears and bold the m on mat. 'and' is in red font and 'on' is bold. 'fat' as in 'fat cat' is in italics. Most of the others I have left aolone - I think c b and r are reasonably different so have't really done anything to make them stand out. I have only used it with her twice and it seems to help a little in that she did better reading it today than yesterday.
I started to wonder if follwoing the same path as the other early readers in her class is the way to go. I checked out Downsed and it appears that the common view is that children following the regular literacy program in mainstream (with various supports I assume) does work well. So - my quesiton is - does what I am doing sound right? I know with numeracy they suggest teaching 4 and 5 away from each other because they are easily confused becasue they look similar. Any suggestions on how I can continue to help Hannah with her reading of books like this one?
3 and 5 are much more confusing than 4 and 5, especially in the font you are writing. Other confusing numbers are 6 and 9, and some computer people put a stroke in the zero.
ReplyDelete(If it is in old fashioned/modern cursive/printing, then it is something else!)
Great to hear about the Fitzroy readers.
The big fat cat. Oh, he must be corpulent, and obese and enormous!
(Do read the Cat in the Hat: he is very skinny, skinny as a rake).
The PowerPoint presentation is a good idea. Contrast and fonts work well.
Good for emphasising the connecting words which are used for syntax.
(And are the 100 golden/most frequent reading words).