Lamb's language

 One day a few months ago while going through the sandpaper letters Lamb said to me, "I know all of this already, Mum". I explained that I can't know if he knows it unless he shows me which was fine at that moment but it made me wonder if I wasn't failing to see the cues for 'moving on'.

My husband's take on it was "Just move forward until you can see he's reached his limit". A friend of mine who was a teacher for many years in a whole body school which used Montessori and Waldorf activities said much the same thing except that he focused on the potential harm on not moving on in that you might miss a 'sensitive period' for the next thing or that you might inadvertently teach them that the status quo is where they should sit.

So I still do the odd beginning sounds activity with Lamb.

We used the moveable alphabet to find the beginning letters of each of these pictures (from a National Geographic Little Kids Magazine).

But the focus lately has been on three letter phonetics. I tried to use the picture cards from Montessori Print Shop to help him build the words with the moveable alphabet but he never took to that. He likes to sound them out when building rather than copy them.

We started sounding out some words in a little animal book we have and Lamb was enthralled with the idea of 'reading' so I used the phonetic picture cards to make these...

Flashcards with the word on one side to sound out and then a picture on the reverse so that Lamb can check himself if he was right. I store them in a little cardboard box that I covered with black paper for the sake of aesthetics. He loves these but is reaching the end of this too. He gets the concept so I think perhaps we're ready for blends....

I also got a couple of pre-readers from our local library. The type that repeat "I can" and "I like" and the child can work out from the picture and perhaps a first letter what the noun is. He is very much into these but after reading them twice wanted to know if there were any new ones!

So again, it's me trailing!