Homeschooling in the Mountains

So after much thought, research and discussing we have decided to stop OPTGR and go for a true full phonics Orton-Gilligham method of teaching our little ones to read.  It just makes way more sense to me to teach everything phonetically and use no sight words at all to discourage guessing from the get go.  Plus we will be using an O-G method for spelling so it just made more sense overall to start that way too.  Now I did love the scripting in OPGTR but there were just too many things I ended up disliking so we ditched it and moved onto Dancing Bears and we couldn't be more happy with that decision.

Dancing Bears is a synthetic phonics program from the U.K.  which can be found here Sound Foundations.  There are different levels one can choose from to begin with depending on the need of your DC.  I decided to begin with Bear Necessities A1 since T is still rather young and still at the beginning of his journey relatively speaking.  Books A1 and A2 are a more stretched out version of book A taken at a slower pace to better cement the information for younger children or those with LDs.  The book comes with 2 sets of "flash cards"  which can be stored in little envelopes in the front or back of the book.  The front envelope is for the cards your student needs to master whereas the envelope in the back are for the cards the child has already mastered.  The front of each card is the phonogram and the back has the sound(s) for the teacher.  For example you would hold up the card with "a" on it and the child would be expected to give all teh sounds the letter a can make.  Once the student can quickly recall the sound of each card it can be considered mastered and move to the back of the book.

Once all of the cards for A1 have been mastered you then move into oral blending using pictures.  For example you will have a cat, dog and a man.  You would ask the child to point to the picture of the c/ at or the d/ og or the m /an.  the second step would be to move onto the phonemes with the same 3 pictures.  You would ask the child to point to the picture of the c / a / t, d / o / g or the m / a / n.  Once you have passed the oral blending stage you move onto print.  When using the print sections the child is asked to trace words and to read using "the cursor".  The cursor is simply a card with a notch in it so that you can move it over the words to encourage reading from left to right and so you can sound out each sound at a time for reading.  The cursor works beautifully and can be used in early readers that you may use alongside the program.

overall I am very very pleased with this program and DS is enjoying it way more then OPGTR and things are making more sense to him which is awesome!  It is great when he begins to really understand something he was struggling with before now that he has been given better tools to figure it out with.  He has a great desire to learn to read and now we have a program and a method that is working on getting him to that goal and building him a very strong foundation that will make language arts much easier for him in the long run.