Ian is learning to read!

I have spent almost zero time working with Ian on learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet or identifying the sounds that each letter makes. I think he learned most of his letters when I was teaching them to Nadia (when she was 3 years old and he was 2 years old), and I think the time he's spent on the iPad has helped him learn most of the sounds that he didn't know before we got the iPad. If you know the sounds each letter makes, it's not very hard to start decoding simple words. I showed him how to do it, and then Ian read four words for me by sounding them out - nap, map, jam, and mat. I took him upstairs, and Paul was very pleasantly surprised when Ian read four words to him. I've decided to start the Level 1 reading program with Ian, but I'll take it at a very slow pace with him and just do a few minutes here and there.

I had no intention of starting Ian at the age of three, but umpteen times a day he is always saying what letter a word starts with. And he's almost always right. The only time he is wrong is when it's a word that is a bit confusing (ex. a word that starts with the "j" sound but actually starts with the letter "g"). I know that play is what is most important for kids this age. That's one of the advantages of home schooling. The longest that Nadia does school work each day is two hours, and she never has any homework to do, which leaves quite a few hours for playing every day. Of course some homeschoolers would say I am making kindergarten way too academic for her. There are so many different philosophies. There are several moms in the Thursday co-cop who definitely take a very slow start approach to home schooling. Some wait until their children are eight years old to start teaching them how to read, etc. I definitely felt like the odd man out in that group because almost everyone has huge gardens, many don't get their children immunized, etc.

Nadia went through Level 1 very quickly, and she kept at the same pace through the start of Level 2, but I can see now we need to slow down quite a bit now that we've reached lesson nine. She didn't have any trouble with compound words or two syllable words that contained two closed syllables, but now that we've gotten to two syllable words that have one open and one syllable (meaning one long and one short vowel), she's having a harder time. This is one of the advantages of home schooling. I can go at the child's pace since the instruction is 100% individualized.

Technically I should be starting Ian later than Nadia because he wouldn't be old enough for Kindergarten until he was 5 years 8 months old. Since Nadia and Oliver are summer babies, they are old enough for Kindergarten shortly after turning five years old. And in many ways Ian is far less mature than Nadia was at this age - as shown by his struggles in gymnastics class. But he does seem to learn certain things more easily than Nadia did, or maybe it's just because he's not the eldest child and he has benefitted by overhearing me teaching Nadia. We shall see what happens with Oliver. That boy LOVES to play with the letter magnets on the refrigerator (Leap Frog). He has spent more time playing with them than the other two kids have put together.