Grace has been working over the last term on recognizing 100 sight words via flashcards. This has gone well, but at the beginning of this term I could tell that she had these aced and it was time for me to take the next step.
Excited to have her share in the thrill of "reading" a book, I checked out some easy readers from the library. This did not go over well. Her confidence in her reading ability was not high enough to feel comfortable with reading even a simple sentence --- even when I knew that she knew the words. Grace would instantly clam up and state that she didn't want to read it.
Chucking the Easy Readers aside, I began thinking of a less intimidating way to approach the task. I decided to take our flashcards and turn it into a game. Ahead of time, I formulated sentences out of flashcards, and then jumbled them up on the floor. It was Grace's job to hear the sentence dictated to her, and unjumble the sentence by placing the words in the correct sentence order. Grace took to this challenge like bread to butter.
If you think about the process, this is an even more difficult task than simply using one's sight to read and follow a sentence. Grace needed to hear the dictation properly, visualize the words, and then place them in the proper order.
For two weeks I have given her 4 jumbled sentences a day, and almost always she has pulled the sentence together with little hesitation and error. I did find I had two problems: flipping through flashcards to create sentences took awhile, and there are only so many interesting sentences that you can create out of 100 words.
Today, we tried a new task. I told her to give me 4 sentences and I would type them up, print them off, and quickly cut the strips down to individual words. She liked the idea of creating her own sentences. For example, one of her sentences today was "Can I have some more tropical leaves please?" Go figure??? This also was a breeze for me and took a fifth of the time to prepare.
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