Letters, words, books

Violet's latest obsession is with this video called "The Letter Factory."  It is produced by the Leap Frog company.  Friends of mine had recommended it to me as a good way to get kids to learn their letter sounds.  At the risk of sounding like a commercial for this DVD, after two weeks, I am a believer.

First of all, bad Mommy confession: I think Violet has watched this video like 50 times in the past 15 days.  She LOVES it, and Jack loves it too.  It's pretty much one of the few DVDs I have that will keep them both entertained.  But I don't feel too bad about all the TV they have been watching, because Violet has indeed learned all her letter sounds.  The only two that she doesn't do quite right are I and Y.  She adds a "ck" sound at the end of both of those so they sound like "ick" and "yuck," respectively.  I know I'm a proud and biased mother, but I think that's pretty good for a two-year-old!

Leap Frog has made a few other videos in this series, so I recently borrowed "The Talking Words Factory" from the library.  This one is about putting the letters together to make simple words.  Unfortunately for Violet, she set the bar too high with the first video.  I expect her to be reading in two weeks (just kidding).  But this video is actually really good for Jack too.

He is reading at a pretty advanced level for his age, but it's clear to me that he has mostly memorized sight words.  When he comes across a word he doesn't recognize, he can't seem to figure out how to sound it out. The few times I have tried to encourage him to string the letter sounds together, we have both ended up really frustrated.  At this point, I feel it's more important for him to learn to love reading than to actually learn how to do it perfectly, so I just tell him what the word is when he asks.  He has built up quite a store of words in his memory bank that I think he has been able to use to figure out other ones.  But he still doesn't quite get the hang of using phonics to help him read.  I think this video will be really helpful with that.

Jack has been mostly reading Star Wars books.  We have one book about the Phantom Menace movie that is a Level 2 reader that he really likes.  And then we've borrowed a bunch of the Star Wars "visual dictionary" books from the library.  They are way beyond his comprehension both in reading and the maturity of the themes, but it has made for some fun and interesting conversations.  (One recent one was when he asked me what a bounty hunter is.)  His favorite books are the ones that feature Star Wars Legos.  I find the Lego ones in particular to be pretty much glorified catalogs, but I will admit that they really are helping Jack progress with his reading skills.

Since we are talking about reading, I personally have been catching up with a lot of mine.  I've been averaging a little more than a book a week since the beginning of July.  I think the fact that all the TV networks are on summer reruns or in reality TV hell has been helpful for keeping me off the boob tube, not that I watch all that much anyway.  It's so nice to get back into books.  I've been missing them.  I only hope I can pass on this same lifelong love of reading to my kids.