We've now been consciously working on Miya's reading for a little over a year. Last March, when we began, she was a near complete non-reader, recognising maybe only a half-dozen words or so and knowing only some of the letter sounds.
In August, I wrote about where we were at, five months into our project, and the method that we were using for her learning.
In the past eight months, we have mostly followed this same method, with Miya reading out loud to me most days and me reading out loud to her most days. (We do skip days sometimes if we are too busy with other things!)
So, here is where we are at, right now.
A couple of days ago, we got out our Frances books (some pics of the books in the link below) and Miya started reading out loud to me A Birthday for Frances. She didn't feel like reading it all in one session (or even two), and she will likely finish the last couple of pages today. She is probably about 95% correct in her reading of it for the first time.
Notably, she didn't know words like "closet" and "pail" (she struggled to pronounce them and also didn't know what they were -- they are not Kiwi English words). She also struggled to pronounce names like "Ida", "Albert", and "Gloria". But with all of these words, after a few repeat occurrences of them in the story she was saying them smoothly. She continues to sometimes mix up "said" and "and" with each other, as well as mix up "when" and "then" with each other -- that is an ongoing thing with all the books she is reading at the moment, though she almost always self-corrects immediately after saying the wrong word.
But all in all, a pretty good effort. Sometimes I get Miya to read a book two or three times to solidify the new words, but I don't think we need to do this with these Frances books.
Back in 2013, I wrote about Mulan's experience reading these Frances books. It seems that Miya, at 6 years 8 months, is reading at about the same level that Mulan was when she was 6 years 3 months. But Miya started later and is learning faster than Mulan did.
