We love Dick and Jane!

I keep a journal of sorts as a record of what we are doing in our homeschooling.  DO NOT think this is a normal day's entry! I normally have abbreviations/acronyms for the things we do and things aren't written in full sentences but try to write enough to keep me out of trouble in case someone were to check to see if we are actually schooling.  Since I hadn't written in this journal for the entire week about what we'd done in reading, I wrote the following paragraph as a summary for the weeks' work. Hope you can feel the excitement!

This week we started reading "Dick and Jane Fun With Our Family".  She LOVES it!  I can't believe what a breakthrough this is for us.  She read 52 pages the first day!!!  When reading I would immediately supply the word she didn't know/recognize, so she would not experience frustration.  I read several more stories to her when she could read no more.  Today, (Friday), she read 40 pages then she begged me to read till I finished the book! 143 pages!  This book is giving her a lot of repetition/repeating the same words.  She gets confused sometimes if the beginning is varied with uppercase/lowercase.  This is the transition we have been looking for from reading cards to reading books.  Praise the Lord! And thank you God for Beth (who suggested the books to me)!

Okay, I realize all those exclamation points don't make for good writing...but you can't write what I wrote without using them.  It is nearly impossible to convey the excitement I have felt.  Jessie has been reading sight words for a long time, not sure how many words, over 100 I'm sure.  We just hadn't been able to find just the right books to transition to real books.  I had made her one book, using a scrapbook, but we needed more materials to choose from.  The Dick and Jane books repeat over and over the same words, varying the beginnings (upper and lowercase) and consists of mostly words she knew on cards.  We had tried some simple books from the library, each page having 1 sentence, such as I like______ or I see______.  Even though they had pictures, they weren't terribly interesting to her because there was no real story.  She has a bit of a fascination with names, and there are plenty of names in the book to suit her, and the stories, while simple, are sweet and funny.  Although they use the same words over and over somehow in this one book they manage to make many, many stories.  The pictures TELL the story, and she really enjoys that too. Hurray for having found Dick and Jane!