A Creative Mind

I have been working with my 4 year old, trying to begin the process of learning to read. My 4 year old is unique, in that, she cannot sing the alphabet correctly to save her soul...although at least now it contains ALL 26 letters. However, for over a year she has been able to identify each letter correctly by sight. Last year, she began an AWANA program at a local church where she needed to learn Bible verses. To learn these, I would say the verse for her, and ask her to repeat what I just said. Unfortunately, it would never be anything close to what I had said. I liken it to the Friends episode where Phoebe tries to teach Joey the French language. She tries to break down a French phrase, word by word with Joey, and then asks him to put it all together, and of course it is completely different. If you haven't seen this episode, it is one of my favorites. Anyway, today we were working with the 'm' sound, the short 'a' sound, and the 'n' sound. Mmmmm aaaaa nnnnn. The idea was eventually she would be able to recognize and read the word man. But instead, no matter how many times she looked at it, and we pronounced it slowly, she always said, Muh-an, always changing the 'm' sound from mmm to muh when she needed to put the sounds together. We finally ditched looking at the book, and I had her spell man. She did that excellently. So we moved on to pan. I said, "spell pan."

She said, "ummm Q?"

I sighed. "No, what sound is at the beginning of pan?"

She said, "puh"

I said, "what makes that sound?"

She answered excitedly, "P!"

"Very Good. Now spell the word pan."

"Q-A-N."

We stopped there for today.