Montessori Pink Series

Mostly Montessori

For language we mainly do Montessori and have just completed the Pink series work but we also do a bit of Charlotte Mason and smooth phonics.

Let me explain, we started out doing Pink series 1 which according to the resources from the Helpful Garden Blog  (which has the most amazing resources) and Karen Tylers Album involves using the moveable alphabet  and objects to word build, this is not reading but word building and is an exercise in sounding out cvc words and then spelling them with the moveable alphabet.

cvc word building vowel  'i'

cvc word building vowel 'e'

Anyway I digress, we did this activity fine, my boy spelled all the words correctly and seemed to have a firm grasp on sounding out words to spell them. Obviously I assumed that when he came then to reading the cvc words he would be able to transfer that 'sounding out' skill to reading, WRONG. Maybe its my lack of understanding of the method or theory whatever the reason he could not do this, so I began searching for a way to teach him blending and stumbled across Smooth Phonics.
Basically this method involves teaching the child the blends in cvc words like; in, an, on, en, at, it etc...
I didn't do anything fancy here I just wrote them out on paper and then showed how to blend the sounds as per the instructions on the website.
https://sites.google.com/site/eptoolbox/phonics---smooth-blending



Once I had taught him how to blend these key sounds he was successfully reading cvc words. I contracted the various steps of the Montessori pink series as my child is 5 and had a tendency to not read the word properly but guess based on the first letter if he was presented with any picture and word matching activity.
So I removed pink 2 which was matching words to images, instead we just read the words.