Blending letters - Renzo's progress in 2 days

Two days ago, I had a post on my plan to teach Renzo how to blend letters with his basic knowledge on phonics for single alphabet. I introduced the set of cards I made as "New Toy" to Renzo and after playing with them for a short 1 minute on the first night, he returned them to me and told me "Don't want New Toy!!". Argh.... calm down Mummy Chan, like I said, we really need a lot of patience dealing with kids at this age, especially when comes to teaching them as we need to make learning fun for them, which is never easy though.

My sister helped us get a set of phonics books for Renzo at Popular, and she suggested me to try those books since that could help me save a lot of time making DIY cards. So last night, I took out the set of books and opened book number 2, because book number 1 is about basic phonics which Renzo has mastered by now. To my surprise, book number 2 has the exact same concept as the DIY cards I made for Renzo, except for the pictures attached to each words which I do not have for my cards. Well I should not be surprised anyway, my sister is always good at picking the right books for kids. Anyway so last night (Sept 21), I decided to try the book with the cards since the colorful pictures on the book look promising enough to keep Renzo attracted and focused, at least for more than 1 minute I bet.

Look at this video of Renzo blending his words "Fat", "Mat", "Hat", "Cat", "Bat", "Rat" one by one. I didn't manage to capture a nice clip (probably because I was too excited with Renzo's progress), but basically I just put the cards I made on the book to match up with the same words introduced in the book, and covered the pictures at the same time because the purpose is to teach him how to read words, not to memorize the words by looking at pictures.


After this, Renzo happily, and proudly, recited a new nursery rhyme he learned in school to us:


"妹妹背着洋娃娃,
走到花园来看花.
娃娃哭了找妈妈,
树上小鸟笑哈哈" Although he's not been very clear with his pronunciation and missed out "小鸟" in his last sentence (which he did recited clearly before this round but we didn't have the chance to record down), it didn't take us too long to figure out what was he saying.

Now both of us are super enticed and can't wait to see Renzo's progress in next 2 months.