Lesson 74

We are using How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons right now with our 7 year old son C, who is in second grade. We started with lesson 1 a year ago and have been leisurely working our way through the book. This book uses a rather ingenious method of including words in the story that the child would not be able to sound out phonetically. They put the letters the child can sound out in large type, and the "silent" letters that are there just for spelling purposes in small type. They also put lines over the vowels when they are to make their long sound. For example, the word "teach" would look like teach, with a line over the "e". So the child gets used to seeing the correct spelling of more advanced words, but is still able to read them by sounding out.

Today we got to lesson 74.

Lesson 74 is when they stop using different sized type and print the words of each story exactly as they would appear in a regular book. None of the helpful cues from lessons 1-73. It's the big league! Son C was very excited about this lesson and did a great job reading the story! He eagerly asked me to videotape it and put it on my blog so his Washington grandparents could hear him reading. :-)

So here is C, reading some of lesson 74 (I started videotaping about halfway in).