Teach Emma to read in 100 easy lessons

Okay, yes, I am a very proud mama. I am so proud of Emma and all of her hard work the past two years in Montessori. She has worked hard learning her sounds and phonemes. She also worked hard building words with the sounds she knows with the movable alphabet. This is such a cool time in her little life because she can read. She sounds out words in books in her room and when we are driving around. It is so amazing to see her just soaking it all up.

So, when we started doing a lesson out of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy lessons 4 days a week (33 lessons ago), she just took off. It has been so exciting to see her learn to read and be so enthusiastic about it. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is one of the parent curriculums that we learned about in our Direct Instruction Reading class at Gonzaga. Of course, we heard and read the research about Direct Instruction, Phonic based programs and I remember thinking they were just great. We also saw friends and classmates run studies on the program with successful outcomes on adults with disabilities. Let me just tell you that I have a much stronger appreciation and love of DI and Teach Your Child since I have begun it with Emma.

Every day after school Emma has quiet time in her room during the first half of Caitlyn's nap. She gets to do puzzles, paper dolls, play school or read books. When her quiet time is up she comes downstairs and we do reading while C bear is still down. She gets out our materials and loves to write our names for the Mommy vs. Emma game. She gets points for reading words independently and sitting nice and I get points when I have to help her or when she is not sitting the right way. (She always wins- we have had some close games though). After she wins, she totals her points and gets her reward- something she has chosen. Today, it was trial mix, some days it is popcorn or the ever so reinforcing M & M's.

Here is a picture of the Emma vs. Mom game

This is the story Emma read today.

First Sentence.

The second sentence was too long to upload to blogger. :(

Third sentence.

I love that when you put a data based curriculum with good instruction and a strong enough reinforcer you can teach anything.

YAY Emma. You rock girl. Keep up the good work.