First Reading Lesson

I did lesson one in the Distar book with Natasha tonight. I think she wasn’t really very interested, but the premium mama-time was too valuable to pass-up.

I saw right away the difficulty resulting from of teaching letters before sounds (something the introduction expounds on, eloquently, though I honestly don’t know how to avoid it: “You, there, Grandma! Quit telling the girl her alphabet!” I mean, really!)

Natasha made both the mistakes the introduction describes: wanting to say letter names rather than sounds, and (at one point) exclaiming, “M! That starts with mouse!”

What ended up working well was describing names, as opposed to the sounds they make. I used kitty as an example: “Its name is cat, but it says ‘meow.’ Yes, this is an ’em,’ but is says ‘mmmmm,’ and that’s what we’re using right now.” The analogy seemed to work for her, but the “say it fast” game didn’t go smoothly at first.

I think we’ll repeat lesson 1 before we go on to lesson 2. Tomorrow, I hope. She almost seemed to get the idea of things toward the end, but I didn’t want to hammer things into the ground on our first day.

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