Tuesday, August 10, 2010

To homeschool reading

This might not help you, since they already got started, but my start with reading myself - I already knew what reading meant - was asking gramp "what does this say"?

MYGGEN FLYGER (the midge flie=the mosquitoes are soaring)

He pronounced the phrase, then taught me each letter.

When I got to kindergarden I was already a confirmed reader.

Another idea, one I learned later, is: after them knowing each letter, let them learn each possible combination of two - three letters in each possible pronunciation. Every syllable onset (t, th, st, s, tr, str ...) and every syllable core or ending (a, ad, ae, an, and, ang, am, ath - ame, ane, athe, ...).

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Boulogne Billancourt
11 - 10/VIII/2010

PS, 31/VIII: and reading sign posts is a very good exercise too, as I remembered in a train journey last week. A black man with two boys were talking about this and that (including that other person being or not being a Moslem) and when they came to a station the boy asked "what is there on the sign in front of the sign in blue" the man answered - reading the sign in blue - the name of the station, adding an explanation about orthography (a-u-x = "aw") and the boy insisted - "but the other sign, in front of it!" - "yes" - "Alarme" - "but that is a sign in yellow" - "yes, but it is in front of the one in blue". Or otherwise it was the dad who started quizzing the boy, but at least the boy brought up the sign with "alarme". I went forth to ask him whether he was teaching his boy reading by reading sign-posts. He was. I said it was a good method and told him about my grand-pa./HGL

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