Language, letters and beginning reading

L is most definitely in a sensitive period for language and letters. Since she pretty much had all her lower case letter sounds down I introduced the upper case. We found this foam puzzle at the dollar store and the upper case letters were actually mine when I was a kid(way to go mom!)

We started off playing a game where I find the upper case and she finds the lower case. She can do them by herself now and can't get enough. She brings it out all the time and it's starting to drive me bonkers!


We've been playing stage four of the eye spy game so I finally made up some last letter sound sorts. All of the pictures start with the same letter to make it less complicated.

We also tried writing some letters in salt which was a big hit. First we tried easy ones like "o", "i" and "u" which were a great success. L was so excited and wanted to try them all which was of course disastrous! We just haven't worked enough on tracing the sandpaper letters yet for her to have any clue where to start writing them. It was fun but we'll do a lot more tracing work before trying to write more letters.

I was reading through some old posts from The Adventures of Bear(fantastic blog) and saw her poor mans version of the spinny speller. L came over and looked at the screen. She said c-a-f. So I pointed to the last letter and asked her what it was and she said t. Then she said cat. WHAT!? Okay so as soon she'd gone to bed I made my own version.

Today we tried it starting with "at" I said "a" and "t" each separately and then blended them. Then she said "at". We tried the first word cat and she got it. Then tried the rest. She got them so I added the pictures which she matched.

We moved on to her sounding out the words on these cards and matching them to the pictures. No problem! She wanted to do more but I didn't have anything else prepared. She is just exploding in her understanding in this area and I can't seem to keep up. I suppose tonight I'll have to make another "spinny speller" and find some more pictures.

I know with the Montessori Method the children learn to write the words first which I want to try but I don't have a movable alphabet. Soon I'll introduce step five of the eye spy game and while I'm doing that try and figure out how to make up my own version of the movable alphabet.

I'm starting to get out of my depth here and can't wait until she starts Montessori school in September!