Road Bump

Munchkin has been doing fabulous in his phonics studies and decent in math.  The video segments have definitely helped him.  The most surprising area in which they have helped is handwriting.  For whatever reason, seeing someone write the letters in a video gets through better than watching me write the letters.  He is getting much better at the fine motor skills that he needs for handwriting.

We are finally through enough of the beginning phonics letters that I started a new type of phonics exercise.  Munchkin must sort a set of pictures based on the first sound of the word.  I say the word and then he has to put the card with the correct letter.  Then a following exercise has him give me the letter that he hears at the beginning of the word that I say. 

Well, we've hit a road bump.  From Munchkin's reaction it appears that he has not done this type of activity in the past - at all.  Most of the exercises I do with him, he has done at some point in the past in some way, so there isn't a lot of confusion over instructions.  He was extremely confused over the instructions for these exercises.  I spent a few days reviewing the activity with him and "practicing" the first couple of words.  We are getting over that road bump because he really does pick up on instructions quickly.  Especially when explained clearly and calmly.  And because he really wants to learn.  He has come to love it when he does something correctly, by himself, and gets praise for it.  His confidence has definitely grown over the last year or so. 

My frustration is that this is a big connection for him not to have made in the past.  It will teach him how to "build" spoken words as well as how to read.  And he is really wanting to talk.  He tries more and more.  So hopefully as he learns this he will be able to piece things together for speaking.

But we've hit a bigger road bump at the moment.  Munchkin can only listen to, and filter the sounds, for 2 or 3 words before his brain seems to find the task too difficult.  Then he gets very frustrated and falls back on the "look for other clues" behavior.  The only problem, for him, is that there are no longer any other clues.  Not even the body language cues he used to try to use.  So he gets really frustrated and upset because he hears "no, try again" much more frequently than he likes.

So the challenge, for me, was to create a way that we could continue to work on this problem without providing Munchkin with a way to cheat while keeping his frustration level low so that he doesn't "shut down".  After discussing this with several folks, including one who specializes in early education, I have a plan. 

Step one is that rather than doing ten words in one session, I will break it down into three sessions doing three words each.  When that becomes easier for him to handle, I will do more words and fewer sessions until we work our way back to one session.  And once we are back to one session, we will work on more words per session.

Step two is to find a lot of pictures.  A whole lot of pictures.  The reason for this is that over time my son is capable of memorizing which pictures go into which piles and vice versa.  That would result in him blocking the purpose for the exercise, which is to learn to listen to the verbal words and filter the sounds.  So I started with one letter and made lots of little 1" x 1" pictures of real life objects.  In total, it's about 10 or so words for each letter but there are 5 or more pictures for each word.  These will be used for one worksheet exercise where he creates a wheel with the words for each letter.  So he'll do a wheel for each letter every day, hence the need for so many pictures.  The second reason for so many pictures is to do the same thing with flash cards.  In this way, he shouldn't see the same image more than once in the course of a weeks lessons.  He will be forced to focus on the sound that goes with the image.

One of the side effects of so many images is that he will learn to associate multiple images to a word, rather than just one image.  And all the images I'm using are real life images, so they are things that he will see when we are out and about.  This should help him to start making even more connections between his lessons and the world around him.

Now I would love to share the picture collections with you but I don't have that right.  I can suggest that you spend the time doing this if you are dealing with this situation.  For me it has been the work of quite a few hours but I find it worth the effort.  For a teacher, these collections would only have to be built once to last quite a few years.

And on to the last step, which is to make a collection of words that I can say to him that do not have the other letters we are working on in them.  Since he is having issues filtering the sounds, for right now we want to make it as easy as possible for him to filter the correct sound.  When he's back to a once a day session, we'll see about making it a bit harder by first making him listen for the last sound and then, later, using words that have multiple sounds.  It's going to be tricky for a bit but I'm sure that the group of us will manage to find enough single syllable words to keep it going while he works through this problem.

Honestly though, compared to some of the past issues we've dealt with, this one should be just a mild bump in the road.   Especially since Munchkin really, really wants to hear "Good Job" and the happiness in my voice when I say it.  I really don't know when that became a major motivator for him, but it has.  And, truly, his confidence in his own abilities has grown by leaps and bounds.