It's been arranged that he comes along with his mum, but minus his baby sister, every Sunday morning for his 'lesson'. She'll do the back-up work at home with him during the week.
Before starting, we purchase a colour printer. We had a black/white one but I couldn't bear to produce the lovely worksheets in B/W. We did consider putting the contents on a disc and taking it to a printer to print out in colour but it seemed an awful lot of hassle, and probably nearly as expensive in the long run. In case you're interested, the one we bought -recommended as v. cheap but perfectly OK printing, by my eldest son -was a Canon MP210 from Amazon.
I also got a file to hold the worksheets and an exercise book to stick in the individual grapheme tiles along with a wordbank sheet. We already had a Jolly Phonics magnetic letters set.
Last week he had his first lesson -we did the first 6 sounds, which seems a lot, but I'd already done some work with him in the past and he knew all of them, so it was only revision. He read all the words on the 1st three wordbank sheets confidently. I asked his mum to put up the A5 posters as a frieze in his bedroom.
This week, when he arrived, he proudly showed me the worksheets from last week that he had finished for homework. He had coloured in the pictures, attempted a drawing and had been practising his words.
We tackled c/k/ck and e, with no real problems. ck was a new GPC and the first time he had encountered 2 letters = a sound, but it didn't seem to worry him. He is a v. lively, wriggly boy so keeping him concentrating could be tricky, but, so far, the worksheets and activities have held his interest.
He's very good at holding his pencil correctly as, from the very first occasion that he held a pencil, I've used Debbie's mantra 'froggy legs and sit it on the log'.
I'll try to keep posting about how we're progressing
