Jackie had the awesome opportunity to learn phonics first as the basis of her reading training. As her teacher, I was able to start her lessons with letter recognition (recognizing them by their sounds and not their names), fun games and songs, and eventually letter blending. What I found with Jackie was that she was a very smart little girl, but was timid to learn new reading lessons. I think it was because she wanted to know all the rules right away and was afraid of making mistakes when she first learned new skills.
Because of this, I had to come up with a game plan to build her confidence and help her relax so that the new lessons came more easily to her. Much like the past posts I’ve done on building confidence, the key to helping Jackie build her confidence was through positive feedback, reinforcement, and turning lessons into non-threatening games. The awesome part is with those three tools, it only took the time for her to go through the five short vowels before I really didn’t have to rely on them anymore! Once she was comfortable with her skills and knew that a few mistakes happen along the way, but they’re no big deal, she was unstoppable!
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