Learning to Read

This is only our 2nd year homeschooling (after having the two oldest in public school) and so I have never had a kindergartner to teach. I have really been struggling with the prospect of being responsible for this responsibility. Peanut came out of kindergarten reading at least a grade level above her and of course I wonder if I'll cause Sweet Baby to be behind by the time we are done with this year.

We are using Sing, Spell, Read and Write and Sweet Baby is really enjoying it. So far we have been able to do one letter a day and we are starting "G" today. She enjoys the song and she sings along to as she uses her pointer finger and points to the letter and the picture of the sound the letter makes at the same time.

Sweet Baby has about 12 small sight words that she knows and one of them includes the word "at". I realized that we had done enough letters for her to be able to start putting them together to make words like "dad", "cab", etc. So we talked about how to squish the sounds together to make words. I pulled out a book that has short "a" words and she was able to sound out 4 words with only a small amount of help - "cat, rat, sat, bat"! I was so excited for both of us that I nearly cried!