Sample reading lesson: First Grade

Sometimes I think that because of all the planning and scheduling I do, people probably think that we do a LOT of school.  We don't, really.  We do short lessons for each subject- 10-20 minutes- and it's my goal to be finished by noon.  (Of course, today it's 12:35 and Ella is still working on her Math... so there are exceptions, but that's the goal, and we usually achieve this goal.)

So, today I thought I'd give you an example of how simple our schooling really is.  :)

Each Monday I give Isaias (6) a reading lesson- which is not to say that he doesn't practice reading on other days of the week- it just means that on Mondays we have uninterrupted time- just the two of us- to work on his reading.

This is what we did today:

We got all cozy under a blanket and he read a BOB book to me.  Up, Pup is what he read, and it has sentences like Bud was Pug's pup and Bet sat on Bob in it.  (And as he was reading, I was thinking that reading teachers or kindergarden teachers or first grade teachers or whenever and whoever has this as their job in public school--  (See?  I'm so out of touch I don't even KNOW anymore!) have a difficult job, because listening to beginning readers stumbling over words all day long might make me pull my hair out.) 

You'll be happy to know that I did not pull my hair out because I only have one beginning reader and I can handle that.   As he read the book, I could tell that he was struggling with a few things:

*occasionally he would use the short e sound (e as in elephant) instead of the u sound
*he was mixing up the uppercase B's and P's-- sometimes he was using the B-sound for the P, and vice versa
*he was mixing up his lowercase b's and d's- as ALL of my kids have done-  (and no.  I have no tricks.  I've tried everything.  They just get those two mixed up and eventually learn.)

So we read the book again, and he did much better the second time around, and he was quite pleased with his success- that second time through he was a whiz!- and he knew it.

Then I got out my binder, in which I have several pages of short-vowel sound words (three and four letters long):

I pointed to each "u" word on the right hand side and he read those- easily, this time.

Then we talked about lowercase b's and d's and I pointed some of them out on another page of words, and then I asked him to make the "b" sound each time I pointed to a b, and he did. I pointed to about 5-6 b's. Then we did the same thing with d's.

I said "Great job!" and we were done.  Reading lesson over.  (Next week we'll do something else entirely, but that was it for today.)  It took about 20 minutes and we were done.  Then he scurried off to do some table work- Explode the Code and copywork- and then he was done for the day. (We'd already read an excerpt from our history book at the breakfast table and had done Bible and memory work, too.)  See?  Easy, peasy.