I’m so proud of August tonight that I could EXPLODE.

I’ve been teaching August his letter to sound rules since he was 1 year old (he turns 3 in June)- not with any pressure or requirement for him to know them, just by having FUN singing our “sing the sounds” resource. It’s a song available in my shop that teaches what sounds all the letters make.

So I’ve known that he’s been able to hear the sounds at the start of words and and switch in other sounds for a long while now, but in the past few months he’s been showing a LOT of interest in decoding words himself. Decoding is a fancy term for looking at a word and working out how to say it by saying all the sounds you can see. So I bought this game from Kmart on a whim to have a go at ENCODING with him. That’s where you say a word and work out what letters you need to go in it.

I’m not playing it like bingo as it says on the box because I knew he wouldn’t have the attention span for that - but I’ve instead provided a small pool of letters for him to choose from. This was our second board so he got a bit silly - I wanted to show you how he’s still learning through all that silly part!

It’s really important that learning is fun and I want to hammer home that there should never be any pressure. Im proud of august because this is a pretty advanced skill that they teach in schools and I would have never have tried this with him if he hadn’t have been so interested of his own accord. Kids truly don’t need to be drilled and tested until they know something. Learning should be organic and following their lead is key.

Please do remember that August has a speech therapist as a mother - not expecting little kids to be able to do this. He gets a lot of specialised input coz I can’t turn off my training!

Watch how this went here