The continuing saga of reading

Erika definitely has her own ideas about reading, which means she's not terribly teachable. She only likes to work on reading right before bed, when she's exhausted. She doesn't really want any kind of systematic instruction. All she wants to do right now is read Bob books, usually only once for each book, so she doesn't get much practice before moving on to harder material. It's not what I would consider an ideal learning situation.

One of the things that often happens is that she doesn't want to try to decode unfamiliar words that she's perfectly capable of decoding. For example, the other night she professed complete ignorance of the word "skipped" despite having correctly read the word "skipper" in the same sentence. She likes it if I sound out the word for her, at which point she knows exactly what it is.

When the same kind of thing happened tonight, I came up with a new strategy. I suggested that I sound out every other letter.

What I didn't expect is that this would cause her to read the whole word. I just figured we'd take turns sounding out the letters. It turned out that once she'd sounded out the first letter, she just went ahead and read the word. This probably happened 4 times. I guess the idea that we'd take turns made it enough fun that she was willing to focus, and once she focused, she no longer wanted or needed any help.

I'll be interested to see what happens from here.