Haroun’s word-attack skills are improving, particularly with longer compound words. He is more attentive to small function words like ‘a’ and ‘the’. But I have been increasingly worried about single-syllable words which he mispronounces and then doesn’t recognize.
We started the BLENDING program back in December in our intensive “Christmas Crash Program”, and then volunteers took over, working steadily with him over months but at a less intensive pace. He had ‘mastered’ every lesson in the BLENDING program, and I assumed that skill was behind us.
But on Friday I pulled up BLENDING and used the ‘navigation’ feature to pop around to some pages I wanted to check. Almost immediately we found critical weaknesses. The prefix was a mystery to him (‘champ’, ‘chess’). And he struggled with vowel contrasts involving /eh/.
This has to be fixed. We will be starting each morning with 20 minutes of drills from the BLENDING program.
Check out the video – about a minute long – to see the approach. Haroun gets very quiet when he isn’t sure he is pronouncing correctly. By the end of our session he was accurate and confident with this pair of vowels, and was solid.
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