Over the last year, Hannah has moved from being a pre-reader to a voracious reader. When the Camaratas diagnosed her with the mixed expressive/receptive language disorder, they confirmed for me something I suspected - that phonics would be a very difficult way for her to learn to read. Fortunately I was already against the phonics only method anyway.
I have been reading to Hannah since the day she was born, and she quickly grew to love books, and even when very young I would find her with a stack of books going over every page. During our kindergarten year of homeschool, most of our work was focused still on spoken and understood language development, and books remained an important tool in this process. In January 2008, I greatly increased our focus on written words.
This may sound strange, but one very important tool in building her reading foundation was actually a phonics based program known as Reading Rods. We have used (and continue to use) a variety of the Reading Rods sets, and if anyone is interested I'll be glad to give you more specifics). The great thing about this tool is that it is not only visual, but tactile as well. So, I removed the phonics aspect and adapted to Hannah's learning style - she very quickly learned to build (literally) words; the success and fun the Reading Rods offered her was a great kick-off to her wanting to learn to read.
I'm going to be putting up more posts over the next few days about teaching a child with a mixed expressive/receptive language disorder how to read, but I'll close for now and wish you a good night.
OneMom
