Observations about Ella's reading

FROM DEB:

Ella is right in the middle of learning to read, and I'm finding it fascinating. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we're mainly using a Phonics books series from Educator's Publishing Service. We're only using the storybooks, not the workbooks or the teacher's guide, and she is getting things just by reading it. We read between 5 and 8 pages per day of a 16-page book. (Actually, by the end of set 3, she could read a whole book in one half-hour setting, but in Set 4 we're starting to get compound words and some irregular stuff, so we scaled back.) She is reading stuff like:

Just then, a man stepped off his porch. He had a pitchfork in his hand.

About a month ago, she started using the context of the story a lot more to figure out what the words are. And now I see her doing it with words like "stepped" -- which she actually got. When it gets to a word like stepped or pitchfork, I usually use a finger to cover up the second part of the word so she could get it bit by bit. Earlier this week, she started doing that herself.

Also, about a month ago, I noticed a real increase in the number of sight words she was using: said, and, for, from, the, you, have, little. Interestingly, she was mixing up "said" and "and" quite a bit, and if you think about it, it makes sense...they are shaped mostly the same, and the top of the s is curvy like the top of the a.  But now that she's using context a lot more, she now only mixes up "said" and "and" rarely.

She has the "th" sound down pat. With "sh" she always sounds out "s" and "h" and then remembers after doing s-h that it's "shhh." With the "ch" sound she still always has to be reminded, except when it comes at the end of a word that she knows from the context, like "much" or "lunch."

About two weeks ago, she started putting consonant clusters together as she was sounding out the words. That is, the word "flat" would always be broken up into the four component sounds: F - L - A - T and then said more quickly until she got the word. Now, she'll see the fl and put that together so that she ends up reading F - L --- FL --   FL - A - T.