Learning to Read: Manipulating Words

Big Snail has been learning to read through writing (to see why, view this post). When he writes, he jumbles the words together and hasn't seen yet that words in a sentence are separated by spaces. To help him with this, he needed to be able to manipulate the words.

I don't have a pocket chart and thought about sewing one up, but wanted something super quick and easy. So, I stuck velcro onto the back of our dry erase board.

First, I asked him to write a story on a piece of paper. His story had two sentences. I then took two different colored index cards (one for each sentence) and he wrote each word from each sentence onto the index cards. If we continue to do this, I will eventually use all plain white index cards. I used two different colors because I want him to visually see that he has written two sentences. I put pieces of velcro onto the back of each index card.


We began the game with me modeling how to play. I put the cards into piles onto the floor and then assembled the sentences one by one. I sounded out the words as I placed them onto the sentence "strip." When I was done, I re-read the sentences and pointed to each one as I read the words.

Then, it was Big Snail's turn. We put the cards back into piles on the floor.


He constructed his first sentence and then read each word by pointing to it.


And so the game continues...


To my surprise, when he later read "Go, Dog, Go" he pointed to each and every word as he read. When I taught in the public school classroom, it took months for kids to get this concept. I guess that is the joy of homeschooling. Big Snail was developmentally ready to take this leap in his reading/writing development and I just happened to "teach" him this at the right moment. I think this will become a favorite game of ours because Big Snail spent about 30 minutes teaching his sister how to play.

In the future, I will laminate his words before I put on the velcro. I will keep all of his words that he writes in a basket. I will not throw away his words or make them disposable (writing on the laminated cards with a dry erase marker) because I want him to be able to revisit this story whenever he wants. I also want him to feel that his writing is always important.

I also expect him to continue to jumble the words when he writes until he is a little older (about First Grade). I hope to get him a little spaceman spacer to use when he writes.