I also did post something "real" right before this, so don't forget to scroll down.
So... how do you teach letters and numbers at the same time? Or do you wait to teach them separately? How high can most 3 and 4 year olds count? As high as you let them?
And when you are teaching letters, do you start with just the basic sounds of each letter as I'm doing now, like A for Apple, B for Banana, E for Elephant, or do you do A for Apple and Mama and Ape. And when do you introduce things like SH and CH (cause there are a lot of those in German!), I suppose they're called letter combinations or something. Right now I figured we would just do the basic letter sounds and then in 2012 when Abigail is older and able to write/work on her letters more seriously I can do the basic for her and move on to the more complicated for Joshua. What do teachers in school do? (It's like I never went there or something? honestly, didn't I pay attention as a 5 year old!)
In my family we learned to read BEFORE we went to kindergarten. Is that normal and something I should shoot for? Or is it a kid specific thing? It just seems natural to me that after you learn your alphabet and your letter combinations, you should just move right on to reading.
5 years ago
I started with letter recognition and then to letter sounds. From there we started sounding out words and took the letter combos as we came across them. With Bella's kindergarten program we included reading but she also did kindergarten early. I think making a list of skills you want him to learn and the branching off of that would help. That way it is child based but you have a goal in mind and can kind of guide him in the right direction. At least, that is what I do with Bella. The questions you have a awesome! Keep asking them, that will help you get you priorites in line. You are doing a great job!
ReplyDeleteI have some neat books and CDs for learning letters and sounds. I'm going to incorporate them into our preschool. They teach letter recognition first (the alphabet) then they teach vowels, then the consonants. We will probably do that as well. Once Vince recognizes all the letters, we'll move on to sounds (although he does know some of the sounds already, thanks to Super Why! - heh)
ReplyDeleteSo are you teaching him to read in English or Portuguese? My problem(?) is I'm teaching the alphabet in German, so the sounds and words I use are of course different so I have to either make my own stuff up or adapt programs. So far we're on B and we're doing ok.
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