The Angel Sounds...

Last week we started on vowels!  This is a big deal for us.  All year we've been working on the consonants and reading/ telling fairy tales that go with each story.  Our curriculum tells a lovely "container story" of a little girl who is on a journey to receiving a great gift.  I wrote more on that here.  Anyway, we are finally at the point of learning what those gifts are, the vowels of course!  The key to reading!

A week earlier we learned the roman numerals and made some keys for each number. Now, Michael has to use his keys in order to open the 5 doors.

I quickly drew 5 doors with their corresponding Roman Numeral on this piece of wood.  Michael really loved pretending to unlock the door.  

I told him the story of "The White Snake", by Brothers Grimm for letter A.  This is not the fairytale story that the curriculum provides, but... have you ever had a Grimm's story just rub you the wrong way? There have only been a couple that I really don't like and ,"Our Lady's Child", is one of them.  So, with the recommendation of my friend Becca over at Cedar Ring Mama, I chose, "The White Snake".

I told the story with the help of a few props, including a little wooden castle, tree, felt pond and a couple of gnomes.  Then we practiced some words using our vowel sound.

Our watercolor cards have been a tremendous help in learning all of the sounds.  I notice Michael remembers the sound better when I've drawn or painted something simple on the card from our story.  Some of them have this and some are just plain letters.  I've been a little inconsistent with them. I want to illustrate the plain ones as it really does seem to help.

We go through our cards every school day to remember the sounds.  To make it fun, we also use scrabble tiles as well.  We tile them up on the wooden tile stand, saying each sound as we go. The last letter that is put on, filling the stand, gets to push every other letter off.  Of course Michael thinks this is great fun! 

So, I'm not really sure how this reading thing goes. I feel a bit like I'm on the edge of a great abyss or waiting with bated breath to see when it will all just click.  Does it happen that way?  Right now Michael sounds out the words really well but has a hard time getting those individual sounds to sound like a word.  Does that make sense?  I guess, we will just practice, practice and keep it fun.  Any sage advice or stories of your experiences are more than welcome!

Until next time...