Sounding It Out

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Learning How To Read Status:
Both of my children are working on reading this year.   My son is doing it in the traditional way using  the Roman or Latin alphabet in print.   In other words, my son reads with his eyes.   My daughter uses the same alphabet from a letter standpoint but has the letters translated into braille format and has to feel them with her fingers to read.

Both children are doing well.   My son is reading words in the beginner books primarily as sight words, adding new words each book and sounding out words as necessary.    My daughter is mostly working on words letter by letter, sounding them each out as she spells them because you can’t grasp a whole word at once when you’re only feeling one letter at a time.

My daughter is really doing well though.   She’s got the letters down and even knows some contracted words or shorcuts, or ‘secret codes’ for common words using only one braille cell in place of the whole word.    She’s also getting good at sounding out words.  

Here are two pages she did tonight.   She read all the letters, sounding out the words as she went along, asking if there were any silent letters in the words.   Sometime I helped her with specific pronunciation of a character that has more than one sound depending on context.  

She sounded out ‘dinosaur’ and ’envelope’ and figured out the words herself.   I didn’t expect her to be able to do long words at this point in learning braille.   She’s also getting faster and faster.   We were going to do one page tonight but she happily did five pages while her brother read two books.