Todd learns to read

Little man has, for a while, been able to identify what words correspond to certain sequences of letters, as I wrote about earlier:

http://toddsdiary.blogspot.com/2008/01/words-so-far.html

Well, this week we added several more words to the list, but not by the usual route. I got Todd's deck of ABC flashcards and decided to try to put some of them together to form short words. He knows his ABCs down cold and he knows his phonics, at least in terms of the sounds individual letters make. Figured it was high time to put those two skills together.

I started off with "A" and "T", forming "AT". After Todd understood how the "at" sound was formed, I added another letter to the beginning. C-A-T. And then M-A-T. A light bulb went off in Todd's head. The next few letters, R, B, and H, came easily. 5 new words!

Couple days later I tested him to see if he remembered it. He needed a bit of prompting at the A-T stage, but once he got it, he was able to fly through those 5 words. I added a couple new letters just to make sure it wasn't rote memorization, and he was able to get the words "pat" and "sat" without any trouble. In fact, he even went on to further define "sat" for me, explaining that it came from "sitting"!

Later that night, I quizzed him verbally: "What does C-A-T spell?"
"Cat!" came the immediate response, and likewise through all of his -at ending words.

Our ittle man is reading! :-)