Reading lesson with Happy Phonics and "Go, Dog. Go!"

Johnny has been patiently waiting for the delivery of All About Reading. The mail has been delayed thanks to the arctic weather we've been having.

He wanted another DIY reading lesson.

Today, I pulled out some games from our Happy Phonics kit. Have I talked about Happy Phonics on here before, or just in my head? I picked HP up from a used sale for $20. It's a steal at that price (new is $50 I think) because my set was pre-cut and sorted. Some things were even laminated! To me, that's better than new.

Happy Phonics is cool because it has a large variety of reading games. Really simple stuff on cardstock, but fun for kids and seriously educational.

Today, Johnny and I did "The Reading House" where we read words ending with -all, -at, and -ame. We slid letters through the reading house, so Johnny read things like "ball," "call," "wall," etc.

Next, we did "rhyme time" where we matched pictures (not words or letters) of things that rhymed. So, cat and hat, etc.

Our last game was "the castle game" (I think?) which was a board-game style page with all of the vowels as spaces on the board. We took turns flipping picture cards, and we moved our token to the space where the vowel was represented. For example, a picture of a hat, we'd move to an "a." Bus, move it to the "u." We moved our tokens up the game board toward the castle. Johnny won. He usually does.

I am so pleased with how he's responding to the games in Happy Phonics. They really are fun for him, and they're a great reinforcement. HP encourages use with Explode the Code workbooks. I have a couple of them but I'm just not sure if I want to use them. We'll see.

After that, I asked if he'd read a book to me. I picked "Go, Dog. Go!" because it's one of our favorites, and it's on his level.

I had him point to each word as he read it, to help with visual tracking and to make sure he saw each word rather than skip ahead. We paused when he wanted to study the pictures or talk about the wacky dogs. He did great with most words, and I helped him with others.

One of the great things about this book is the repetition. So the word "over" stumped him at first encounter, but it came up again later and he got it.

Toward the end of the 64 pages, I could tell he was getting a little fatigued, so I had him point to each word while I read it.

A completely fun reading lesson and it ended when Vivienne noticed I was missing and wanted some attention. Johnny wanted to keep on reading! Yay!