We hit a big milestone this week with T! He is officially halfway done with TYCTR (more details on the book here)! Here’s how it’s been going.
For the first 10 lessons or so, the book took some getting used to. In the very beginning, it focuses on practicing some basic skills that are fundamentally important for mastering the rest of the lessons. We had some resistance with learning some of these basic skills. For example, it asks the adult to say a word very slowly, and the child needs to say the same word fast. I might say: “mmmmmmmaaaaaaatttttttt” and T needs to respond, “mat”. But once he got the hang of little skills like this, he started cruising along!
From about lesson 10-40, things went smoothly most of the time. We were so impressed by T’s intrinsic motivation and his love for learning. For the most part, he was willing to do the lessons almost every day and even asked us to teach him the lessons a lot of the days. Our biggest hurdle in this phase was keeping his focus as the lessons got a little bit longer and more involved. During these struggle periods, T would get resistant and frustrated sometimes when a lesson would start to drag on a little bit or if he ran into a task that was a little challenging or less intuitive for him. I wrote a post about how we’ve dealt with setbacks like this. Find it here. Another recurring issue was occasionally guessing words instead of sounding them out, which we just had to keep reminding him not to do until he (mostly) broke the habit.
Here are some tasks that he found frustrating at first, but then conquered just like everything else:
- rhyming tasks. These tasks are great for teaching kids to hear sound patterns in word families, but it’s an abstract concept at first, especially since the entire word isn’t written out for the child to sound out. For T, I think he didn’t always comprehend what I was asking him to do in these sections. But with some practice, he got it! And this skill has been really helpful later on in the book, especially when introducing irregular words.
- reading a word fast without reading it slow first (sounding it out silently). T was becoming a champion at sounding things out vocally, but learning to do this in his head caused some significant resistance and confusion at first. For this, we found that practice and small adjustments to the script were helpful: “ Keep your mouth closed while you figure out the word.”
- having to read longer stories twice. After going through all the work to get through a lengthy passage, T inevitably gets upset when I ask him to do it again (for speed and reading comprehension). We’ve found that taking a break at this point is usually helpful.
From about lesson 40-50, our pace slowed down a lot. It started taking us a couple days to get through each lesson, and T’s excitement to sit down and work on a lesson waned significantly. I think this is largely because the stories got quite a bit longer around this point – up to about 10 lines per story. While he remained totally competent and able to read these stories, they started to overwhelm him a bit and the time they took was a little more than his attention span allowed for. So I’ve adjusted my expectations a little bit and accepted the slower pace. I found that pushing him through a lesson when his attention and mood are failing is rarely helpful to either of us. In these cases, we still reward him (in whatever way works for your family) for working on the lesson, even if we didn’t get through the whole thing. But we do expect him to finish the whole lesson(s) to get his sticker and his major rewards. And then we pick up where we left off later that day or the next day.
To celebrate finishing fifty lessons, T got to pick out a really cool Hot Wheels truck from the store. He has been over the moon about it. Achieving something like that is a big deal for a small child, so we wanted him to feel really accomplished and do something for him that felt really special.
If you’re using this book, we’d love to hear about how it’s going and any tips to keep kiddos going strong!
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