The Alphabet is Boring:)

Here is another recent question:

In your blog you mentioned that your daughter knew her alphabet by the age of 2.
What program or strategy did you use to teacher her this skill?

To be honest, I did not teach her the alphabet & did not plan to teach her until she was close to school age - but K had her own timetable & taught herself!

K did watch the Love & Learning videos  on & off from when she was about 1 to 2 years of age.  We also had the Leap Frog alphabet fridge magnets on our fridge & a set of letter fridge magnets & probably a few other toys with letters that allowed her to learn them on her own. She surprised me one day in the hardware store, when she started pointing out letters on the signs.  I still remember my shock & amazement when she toddled over to a  Shamwow display rack, pointed at the M & said M,  mmmm.

As I stated earlier, I did not plan to teach her letters & don't see the point in purposefully teaching this to a very young child.  The alphabet really has no meaning to a toddler & won't be much fun to learn.  Because sight words are the most effective way to teach a toddler (teaching phonics is really important, just not at this age - click on this post as well as this one for my reasoning for this), I don't think that teaching the alphabet is helpful.

Sight words are so much more fun! Put yourself in a toddler's shoes.  Would you rather learn that A says aaaa, or that M.O.M. spells Mom? We focused on the most important words in K's life first.  Family & pet names, favorite toys, foods & animals. Reading needs to be fun at this age in order to foster a lifelong love of reading.

If however, you have a school age, or almost school age child, letters will probably be more beneficial to help them keep up with what the other kids are learning.  We did intend to teach K letters by about age 5, before we realized that she had taught herself the alphabet.

Some good resources that I can think of off the top of my head are the many iPad/iPhone apps available.  We like LetterSchool lately for printing practice, but I think it would also help a child learn the letters.

There are some good DVD's out there but my tired brain doesn't seem to be able to come up with a title tonight!  I'll try to edit this with an example.

This is a similar product to the one that k used to teach herself the alphabet: LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Alphabet.

Alphabet letters are everywhere, making it so easy to incorporate fun games into everyday life.  There are big foamy bathtub letters & letter stickers to do different projects with. Our local Dollar Store has tons of different types of letters in the toy aisles -you could do so many projects with them.  Pictures, paintings, make one of those find the letter I Spy bags or put the letters in rice or popcorn for a tactile experience.  Use tweezers to grab the letters to work on letter recognition & fine motor at the same time.  Look for letters on signs, etc when going for walks. 

................and lastly, of course good old flashcards - They are tons of commercial ones available, or I'm sure BrillKids has some too.

At what age did K first start reading?

I am not a good record keeper & lost track of how old K was when she started reading.  The other day I stumbled on the post I wrote on a forum when K was 15 months old. I copied it here:

K is 15 months old.  I have been doing a reading program since she was about 6 months, however it has been much more organized since I discovered the Little Reader Program.  I have never tested her before today.  We tested her with about 10 different word cards.  She got every one right!  K has down syndrome.  Thirty years ago I would have been told to put her in an institution because she was unteachable ( I could never have done that).  Even when she was born I was given old & outdated information about her potential.  I admit I had never heard of teaching babies to read a year ago & would not have believed she could do this.  The sky is the limit for my little girl!  Thanks to every one here for all the help and information & for a place to come to celebrate with others who understand.

Thanks again from one proud Momma!

Wow!  I'm glad I found this again!

A Blog Post to Answer Some Early Reading Questions asked by a Reader.

Earlier today someone reading  my blog left a comment & asked some questions.  My response became so long winded, that I decided to put it in a blog post in case others are interested too.

hi there, just wanted to ask how you choose the words you teach you dd every week.. do you choose a subject and make all the cards accordingly?

When K was really little, we choose words that were exciting to her such as the names of her sisters, & grandparents. 

Then we started with common, familiar nouns like animals, foods, pets, & toys.  We continued to use nouns for quite a while because K refused to read words only & insisted on seeing a picture too, although it became harder & harder to find interesting ones, hence the video I posted  here of her reading world monuments. Thankfully Brill Kids has an extensive set of flashcards (literally thousands).

Next we started showing her the Dolch sight words, which kept us going for quite a while & then we taught K a list of dolch phrases.

About this time, K started to be able to read simple library books, so we started to take individual books that were a little above her reading level & teach her the words she didn't know.  


We still teach her words from new, more advanced books, but now we are also doing word families so I am trying to do this with phonics readers.  I have been noticing for a while that K is starting to figure out words that she hasn't been taught.  I am encouraging this skill by moving to word families & teaching them as sight words.

 i just wanted to ask where you got the words from.. do you sort them according to subject, and how you selected the subject?

In the beginning we sorted them by subject, but now we are sorting them by sounds as we are doing word families.  Sometimes we just throw random sets in just for fun or because it is relevant at the moment.  For example, we went to the circus with friends a couple of months ago. I blogged about how I checked on BrillKids & found some circus flashcards which we taught to K on the way.

also, how do you know that she will be able to read and remember all these words later on? i mean after 6 months for example, do you go back to the older words and check to see if she still remembers them?

In the beginning, we  had no idea if K was even learning any words, let alone remembering them for any period of time because we were careful to foster a love of reading by not testing or pressuring her.  Around the age of 2, however, she started to quite happily volunteer the word each time.  Around that time, I started putting one old set of cards in with her new  ones each week.  She never had any trouble remembering the old cards, so finally, by the time she was reading about 700 or 800 words, I quit doing that.  Occasionally we get out her old cards for her to read for fun, but she doesn't have a problem remembering even cards she hasn't seen in 6 months or more.  I know this is a problem for some kids, and I am talking about typical kids when I say this, only because I haven't talked to enough parents of kids with DS who are reading at this age.  I do recommend reviewing old words until you are confident as I am that forgetting words is not a problem.

how do you organize the new things she learns along with the old things she already finished? thanks:)

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by organize, but I'll try to answer.  First of all, I confess.....I am not an organized person!  The Doman method suggests teaching so many words each day & retiring old words & adding new ones each day.  I am not organized enough to do that, so I teach a series of cards for a week, retire all of them & start a new set the next week.  I just store the olds cards in sets with an elastic around each set to seperate them & put them in rectangular baskets.  When I was reviewing on a regular basis, I would set them in the baskets in chronological order, so I was always reviewing the oldest words, & transfer them to a new basket after reviewing them, so I knew which ones I needed to review.

I hope this answers all of your questions.  If you  have any more, please feel free to ask:)

"If I Were a Beep"

This was the first book that K ever just picked up & read to me.  She was just 3  at the time, & her speech wasn't as clear, so it came out more like "If I Were a Beep".  There is something incredibly adorable about a little girl who is able to read a short story, yet unable to pronounce all of the words yet. It was one of the sweetest mispronunciations I have ever heard & I was ecstatic!  This is a book that I will always treasure.  Even the memory of that day makes me tear up through a huge grin.  I have no idea what book my other kids read for the first time.  I know that sounds bad, but it's not that I didn't care, it just wasn't something I stressed about with them.  I was oblivious.  I knew that they would learn to read.  Whether it was at age 4 like one or age 6 like another, I just wasn't worried.   When K was born, learning to read was one of the things that I worried about.  I believed she would eventually learn, but I worried that she would struggle so much that she would not get the same joy out of reading as my older daughters did.  For me, If I Was a Sheep was the moment that I first realized not only that my daughter would learn to read & do it well, but also that it would be a passion for her just like myself & my older kids.  Therefore, I will treasure this little book forever in memory of that moment.



Sensory Play - Popcorn

This was one of K's favorite sensory play activities.  This is best very closely supervised because there is a choking risk with the unpopped popcorn.  We were lucky that K stopped putting things in her mouth fairly early.  She still enjoys this occasionally, but when she was about 2, this activity would keep her occupied for almost an hour at a time! 

You can expand on this activity by having your child count the animals, sort by color, type, etc.  We would change the objects we added fairly often.

This picture is from last fall.  We varied the activity by adding Halloween shapes.