Progress....

"Slow and steady wins the race...." --- this has become my mantra as I adjust to schooling my youngest, recently diagnosed with a whole laundry list of learning differences. I'm learning to notice and cherish all the little signs of progress, because this is going to be a long road.

Yesterday was one of those days with the ever elusive "progress."

Roughly ten days ago, I started working through All About Spelling (AAS) with The Adventurer, one of the things we're doing as we slowly but surely work towards literacy.  One aspect of AAS is teaching the phonograms; that is, showing a card with a letter on it, and having the child learn (and memorize) the sounds represented by that letter.

As we're learning English, the vowels especially have many sounds, and when we started this, The Adventurer knew 10 phonograms. Out of the 26 letters, and all the sounds those represent, he knew ten. Here we are ten days later and he's moved two more letters (and 5 more sounds) to the mastery section, and almost gained a 3rd letter (with 4 sounds) as well. yay! I'm beyond thrilled with this, but that's not the progress I wanted to share.

Another aspect of AAS is having the child segment words into individual sounds. If you think about segmenting words into syllables, you're almost there. Now take it a step further and think about isolating every individual sound. For example, the word "go" can be segmented into /g/-/o/; the word "dog" into /d/-/o/-/g/.

AAS starts with "2-sound words" --- things like go, do, to, see, be, of, etc. --- and then moves onto "3-sound words." In the beginning, the child is handed two (and then three) little tokens, small plastic discs, one for each sound. The teacher (aka, me) speaks the word, then the child repeats the word followed by each sound of the word. As the child says the individual sounds, he pulls a token down towards himself as a way of putting a physical component to the exercise and really making the idea of "separate sounds" something concrete, tangible.  Later on, letter tiles will replace the tokens and the child will pull the right letters; we're not there yet, though.

Ten or so days ago, when I started this, The Adventurer struggled with separating out the individual sounds even in "2-sound words."  I modeled for him, several times, and we did a series of 5 words per day for two or three days before he was really catching on and able to pull tokens with the separate sounds. Once he got it, though, he really got it. Suddenly we flew through the whole 20 word list, and then the next 20 word list, and he looked at me with his, "This is so boring, Mom...." look that tells me he's really mastered it and it's time to move on. So we did.

Three-sound words were next, and I prepped myself for a slow start, just like we'd had with the two-sound words. It had, after all, taken a week to get to mastery of that, and I wasn't sure he could isolate beginning, middle, ending sound of a word.

But he did.

Right away, first word I gave him. I showed him one example, "pig -- /p/-/i/-/g/, pig" and he took it from there. He was so bored that at first he pulled tokens in the wrong order, going right to left instead of left to right, but I gently reminded him that when we read, we read left to right so he needed to pull the tokens in that order, too. It's a concrete reminder of first/middle/last, so it's important he go in order. Five or so words into it, he was doing that as well.

He blew through the entire 25 word list. Without a single error, hesitation, mistake....just perfectly segmented every word I gave him.

Wow. Progress. These are the moments I cherish.