A Healer’s Geste

First TATRAS reading lesson

So today Hans and I sat together in a living room chair and opened up the phonics program together. We used the Penny Primer and Hans sounded out the first 8 letters: s a l t m i n e. He needs to work more on the vowel sounds but he could quickly and easily sound the consonants. Then we went to the first word page and he sounded out with no help at all ‘at.’ Then he said that was like “Cat in the Hat” and he wanted to know where those words were so he could read them (in the Primer). Instead we talked about how ‘cat’ is c + at and ‘hat’ is h + at. The next word was ‘sat’ and he figured that one out immediately after one sounding-out. The next word was ‘last,’ but that was too many sounds for him. He wanted to say ‘ts’ instead of ‘st,’ he couldn’t quickly recall a’s first sound, and he also wanted to be able to figure out the word from context, of which there was none. So he became frustrated and I suggested we do more tomorrow or later today. But he still wanted to do some more, so I took the letter cards (it only comes with the first 8 letters on cards) and the stand, and we made what ‘at’ words we could: sat & mat. Then I changed the ‘a’ for ‘i’ and he got ‘it’ right out of the wings, but couldn’t combine it with ‘s’ to get ‘sit’ — he would only say ‘sat.’

So, we need to work on the vowel sounds the most and I am not going to use any real books for reading lessons until he is reading smoothly (and I’m assuming that could be several months and maybe a year), because he really wants to figure out the word based on the pictures or by simply knowing it’s form rather than sounding it out. Until he can sound things out, I want to keep crutches and temptations to bad habits away. The TATRAS program will help with this because it has only random, unrelated little pictures sprinkled throughout, and so I already told Hans about four times in five minutes that the picture of a bear had nothing to do with the words and was only a decoration; he needed to look at the letters and not the picture to figure out the word.

It’s pretty exciting to work with a budding reader. And we spent less than 10 minutes on this lesson. And Jaeger had a one minute letter-name quiz, and so he was happy as well. :)