Composition on the fly.

By now I've taught him almost all the sounds in English, and he recognizes one or two spellings for each sound.  (For example, he knows that "ai" can spell the so-called "long a" sound.  He knows that either "s" or "z" can spell the sound /z/.)  A few years ago, I was teaching the same concepts to my first son, and waaaay back then I compiled word lists for each sound.  ("Y spells /y/:  yam, yap, yell, yen, yep, yes, yet, yin, yip, yon, yum.  OR spells /or/:  Borax, border, borer, boring, Boris, born, boron, bullhorn…")  That makes the job easier.

Anyway, at this stage my reading teaching tools are very portable and fit in a pouch or a slim binder.  They consist of a dry erase board, a couple of markers, a rag to wipe the board, and my word lists.  I sit down with Milo, scan the lists for good words, and construct sentences in my head, which I write on the board for him to read.  It's kind of fun trying to come up with interesting sentences.

Today's were:

  Look at that fast-running river!

A planet must orbit its sun.  (He really tried hard to turn "must" into "Mars.")

I got a new outfit for Lori's wedding.   (He couldn't really read his aunt's name without some help, and it's not his fault.  That "i spells /ee/" is a ways off.)

It should be pretty obvious that we're working on "oo," "ou," "or," and "ue."  I meant to practice "ch" too but I forgot to include any words.  Oops.

We have to take some time off next week, so I'm going to wait before introducing anything new, but as soon as we start up again I'm going to add the "long vowel" pronunciations of A, E, I, O, U (that  would be "oo" not "yoo").  Once he's got those, he will be able to read — or make good guesses at — quite a lot of common written words.