It is finished and they’ve arrived, fifty USB drives – printed and preloaded with the second edition of Gilead Success with Phonics – with the aid of a very helpful man at Flashbay, which has the added advantage of being an Australian company.
The only problem is now if I want to change or tweak anything in my program, I have to change it by hand fifty times.
The same day that they arrived, I was just starting to help my 9-year-old grandson. He is exceptionally bright, solves a Rubik’s cube in just over a minute, is a whiz at mathematics, probably dyslexic, hates reading and avoids it at all costs. His mother issued the ultimatum, “Either you let your grandmother help you or we’ll hire someone to teach you.”
So I took him through the review of sounds at the end of Levels 5, 6 and 7 in Gilead Success with Phonics, and decided that u_e was the place to start.
We started with a page with animations to show the two sounds of u_e with some short video clips, such as the rude seal that pokes his tongue out, a small boy doing flips down a sand dune, a tune on a tin whistle … Then the interactive comic strip. These were fine.
But then, “What does ‘crude’ mean?” Why did I put that in a list of spelling words? Will I need to change the program? – Lesson 1: Use a dictionary with a child when there is doubt over the meaning of a word. The principal meaning of ‘crude’ is unrefined, as in crude oil.
I printed out the list of u_e words for him to practise reading during the week. Why did I include some two-syllable words without showing them split into syllables? Will I need to change the program? – Lesson 2: Use some ingenuity – mark the syllables in pencil. Once he can read them easily, rub out the pencil lines.
Lesson 3: If this still proves to be too hard, leave them until later and just use the one-syllable words in the list at the moment.
So I have got through my first tutoring session using Gilead Success with Phonics, second edition without needing to change anything in the program. This time I really think I have finished – nearly 30 years’ work!
(Second part of my grandson’s story and the third part.)
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