Reading with Bugsby

Charlie has always enjoyed words.  And I've taken advantage of that enjoyment by working with him on letters, beginning sounds and sight words.  I admit, the pregnancy and birth of Ephram led to some slacking off on my part, but we have continued to work on it as Charlie's interest shows and my energy level allows.  My rationale is that I might as well introduce these things while he's interested, because who knows when that might stop?  And I have been careful not to push him.

Charlie knew the alphabet and recognized all the upper case and lower case letters sometime around two and a half.  Remember, he came to live with us when he was two and three months old... so this was pretty quick progress for a kid that hadn't looked at letters before.  We then started looking at sight words and learning beginning sounds at about the same time.  By the time he was three, Charlie knew 25 sight words.  By last summer he knew 45 very well.  He also recognized about half of the consonant sounds, but the vowels eluded him.  We started working on phonics when he was about three and a half, but this was a concept out of his grasp.  No problem, I just kept on talking about it and breaking words down without pushing him to frustration.  When we read stories, I would stop at the sight words he knew so that he could read them, and I'd continue to read the rest.

For his birthday this past December, my grandma gave Charlie a Bugsby - which is similar to the Tag.  We also have Tag, but something about Bugsby is more intriguing to Charlie.  He took an immediate liking to it and we added a few more books to his collection.  Right away, I was impressed at his comprehension of the stories.  There are little games you can play throughout the book, and Charlie consistently answered the questions correctly.

About two months ago, Charlie suddenly got the concept of beginning sounds.  All of a sudden, he was telling me what letter every word started with.  On a walk he'd be jabbering the whole time, "Mom!  Sidewalk, "ssss" that starts with s!  Street, that starts with s too!  And so does sssstroller!  And Mom starts with m, and grass starts with g...."  I was amazed at how suddenly he grasped this and knew what everything started with.  The only errors he made were with the combined sounds, like "ch".

On Mother's Day we assembled Ephram's exersaucer.  I'm sure I'll post something about that soon.  Without any prompting, Charlie looked at the little book on the exersaucer tray and said, "That says Farm!"  Andy and I looked at it, and sure enough, it did.  Just like that - the concept of phonics was grasped.  Charlie started sounding out more words and will volunteer reading more and more.

What's next?  We need to work on dipthongs and multiple sounds for vowels.  So far he seems to think that vowels always make their short sounds.  But, for age four, I'm pretty impressed with his progress!  Here are a few pictures of Charlie with his favorite toy - Bugsby.