Good books for teaching

As I have mentioned before, teaching Elijah is interesting. It's hard and exhaustive! Not by any fault of Elijah's, he just hasn't been exposed to learning. I started him off learning the letters and how to write them. Then we transitioned to the sounds of each letter. Then we went to blends in words (only after he absolutely knew all the letter sounds) like be in bed or ho in hop.

It really took a long time to get Elijah to understand what it meant by "put the letters together." He didn't grasp sounding out. He would just choose a letter in a word and sound it out or he would start at the end of the word and read backwards.

But finally, thank you Jesus! he has figured it out. It just took 3x as long. He has been reading blends now for about a month. I decided to stay on the blends longer even though once he figured them out, he was good to go.

http://www.sonlight.com/1R16.html

The link about is for a set of books called I Can Read It (books 1-3, word list) by John Holzmann and Avyx publishing. They go in really easy to read format. For example, the first page of the first book is this,

Pat is a rat.
Pat is fat.
Pat is a fat rat.
The fat rat is Pat.
Is Pat fat?
Pat is fat.
Pat is Fat Rat Pat.

Super easy but this worked really well with Elijah. It will also incorporate sight words. He read the first 4 pages today without much help. Page 4 he had never read before and did it quite well. Not only is it teaching reading but it helps with rhyming. The books gradually get more challenging. I used these for Abby and Dale too and they flew through them.

I am so so very thankful he is starting to figure school out. It has not been easy one bit. It is strange teaching a child from Elijah's background (orphanage, no schooling, etc) because it is really easy to forget he has no clue. I just fall into the trap of thinking, "He has to know this, he's 5." I've taken many steps back (after frustration) and had to re-evaluate. It feels really good to know I have 3 out of 3 kids reading. I shall begin all over again when the new little guy gets here. Enter in a whole new challenge...Spanish...