I've been watching my 5 year old daughter learn to read. Initially, she was more interested in writing than reading, so I would simply spell words for her when asked to do so. Since English is a pretty confusing language, I don't set much store in phonetics. My husband is of a different opinion, however, so he taught her to sound out words.
Our curriculum has consisted of lots of reading out loud and answering questions. Morganne went through an invented spelling phase, where she would write us notes with a lot of consonants in them. She's sounding out road signs: "Mama, rigahhuhtuh, what's that word?" "Right." Between Garry's phonetic approach and my "sometimes spelling doesn't make sense, but that's what it spells" whole-word approach, she seems to be learning.
The other night, a very strange thing happened. Morganne and I opened a new chapter book, one we'd never read before, and she proceeded to read the first two sentences fluently, like an adult would read them. The sentences contained some words she'd seen before and a few un-phonetic words that I'm pretty sure were unfamiliar. Then, just like a light switch shutting off, she stopped reading. She went back to sounding out and guessing for the third sentence. She looked tired, so I read the rest of the chapter.
Has anyone else see something like this happen?
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