Zach's 2nd lesson

I've decided that since Zach already knows so many of the sounds, I'll teach him those that he doesn't know, and plunge straight into rules... so that's what we did. Like Stace this week, we covered the c vs k for /k/, dge vs ge vs g vs j for /j/, and the FLOSS rule... I wanted to do more, but I could see that he was very tired by the end of about 40 minutes, so I took out the spelling cards and got him to think the rules through to spell words.

The trouble with teaching Zach is that he is so familiar with the simpler words, I have to move on to the harder ones to bump him up as well as to force him to blend and apply the rules, instead of relying on his superior visual memory.

A shortcut way to do things would be to use his visual memory and just give him word lists to memorise, which he would do easily... but that would defeat the purpose, since he would not be able to memorise and understand the many gazillion words in the English language... not to mention the many other words in the specialised fields he will eventually take up.

Thus I'm keen to quickly familiarise him with the sounds and their rules, then move into suffixes, prefixes as well as syllabication... again the challenge with syllabication is that he is already familiar with so many words, that he wouldn't really be dividing them according to the rules, just plunging straight into reading them as he remembers. And to ask him to divide it up anyway if he already knows the word will only lead to frustration because he sees it as a redundant exercise.... sigh.

I think games is my only solution to this problem... cos if anything is a game, it doesn't matter if it's easy or redundant... then winning by following the rules is what gets us there!