Reading!

One of the greatest rewards of homeschooling has been watching the boys learn to read the last few months. (If I'm honest, some days it is also the greatest frustration if Aiden and Seth whine through their lesson or stumble over words I know they know.) The book we are using is one that I found at our library called The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise and Sarah Buffington. After we'd had it checked out from the library for a few months, I decided it was time to get my own copy. Seth and Aiden are learning to read phonetically... something I never learned when I began reading. They have progressed from learning all the short vowel sounds and simple words like "at" and "big" to learning consonant blends, both at the beginning and ending of words. From there, they've learned digraphs, like "ng", "th" and "sh". Over the last few weeks, they've learned all the long vowel sounds as well. Since we're only on lesson 79 (out of 231), we won't finish this book during preschool. But it has been a wonderful tool and I look forward to teaching Cora and the baby how to read using these same lessons as well.

These are clips that I took today of Seth and Aiden reading sentences from their lesson on the hard and soft sounds of the letter G. I'm so proud of my little readers!