How All About Spelling Saved My Sanity

When it came time to teach my oldest child {ds8} to read, I didn’t…he basically taught himself.  Don’t get me wrong, I tried to teach him,  but I just got in the way.  When he was ready to learn {around age 5}, I taught him the sounds that the letters made and he was off.  My little guy read everything…and those easy phonetic readers just frustrated him.

Enter dd6…my extremely phonetic child.  Bless her little heart, she has been working so hard on learning to read for the past year…and she has finally gotten to the point where she can read four letter words with blends.  She sounds out every.single.word…even if she just read the word one sentence before :)

We began last year with a gentle phonics program {she was 5 1/2}, we’d sit together on the couch and work on reading every morning ~ but eventually this program began to frustrate both her and me.

Since she already knew all of the letter sounds, I decided that maybe we would just spend time practicing reading…so we moved on to reading through the Bob Books…one at a time.  This approach worked for a while, but we needed something more…

Enter All About Spelling…ahhh, finally something that clicks with my little girl.  Yes, this is technically a spelling program, but it covers phonics so completely that I thought it could serve as a phonics/reading instruction program for my extremely phonetic little girl. 

In the first step of Level One we worked on letter sounds.  After quickly covering all 26 phonograms {she already knew them}, we moved on to segmenting words {listening for and saying every sound in a word}.  We began with words with one sound, then moved on to words with two sounds, and finally words with three sounds.  I think it was this process of learning how to segment a word into its individual sounds that finally made the reading process click for her.

Since August, she has progressed all the way to Step 15…she has conquered the digraphs sh, ch, and th and final blends {blends at the end of a word}.  We are now working on initial blends.

She does an amazing job at the magnet board, she can quickly and easily spell most of the words in her lesson…this then gives her the confidence to read these words in her readers.

And now she has her very own hardback reader…one that corresponds with what she’s learning in her daily lessons ~ The Runt Pig.  She is so excited about this reader that she wants to read a chapter every day.  Each day when we sit down to read after her AAS lesson she calls her brothers over so they can listen in too :)

I am so thankful that dd6’s hard work is paying off…to be honest there were times when I feared that I would never be able to teach my free-spirited red-head to read…and she wanted to read so badly.

Thank you All About Spelling…you helped me teach my daughter to read!