Playing With Letters

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning for the past month I've walked a few blocks to a nearby school to play with magnet letters. I sit out in the hallway outside one of the kindergarten rooms with a Ajante.  He's in his second time through kindergarten and he and letters weren't getting along very well.  He had no problem with numbers but some of the letters were not finding a place in his brain.

I started off by giving him a few letters at a time and asking him to find a particular one. One of the tough ones was the M. Our conversation went something like this:
"Have you ever been to McDonalds?"
"Yes"
"Does this look the yellow sign you see outside?"
"Yeah."
For the next few times he would say, "mmmmm, McDonalds, M."
He also decided that the K does look like someone kicking a ball and he has that one down too.

I've been impressed by the progress Ajante has made. In a few weeks he's gone from struggling to know his letters to sounding out words. He does protest when I change the vowel or add a letter to the end. "I don't do 4-letter words. I only do 3-letter words!" But with a little encouragement he gets it. One day I looked at him and said, "You've really been working on this." He just nodded. "Well, keep it up." It's to the point where I may need some help from his teacher in figuring out how to help him learn some of those irregular vowel sounds so common in English - even in those 3 and 4 letter words.