My Little Copy Editor

This one needs some background.

E is the quintessential pre-reader. She knows the sounds of all the letters and the letters of all the sounds. She recognizes words as units and reads her picture books by heart. As of last week, she had eight sight words: E, M, S, B, mommy, baby, book, and no.

The other day she picked up a pack of spelling flash cards M had made and wanted to read them. Since the top word was "experienced," I suggested that they weren't the best words for her, but we could make her her own flash cards. So we did. We made: E, M, B, S, R (her teacher's name), baby, the, went, I, ballet, class, dog, cat, bed, house, horse, and maybe a few others.

Both my kids have great memories--visual and verbal. M looks at a spelling word once and knows it. E learns to recognize words quickly, though often she simply knows the first letter. She learned all her sight words within an hour or so, except she kept mixing up house and horse. But that didn't really matter since her main activity was stringing all the words into long sentences for me to read to her: I ballet bed E class the house, etc.

The other night, though, she was playing with her cards at the kitchen table while I was making dinner. She called me over so she could read her sentence to me: S went to the horse. I told her it was a great sentence but she had used horse instead of house. She thought for a minute and then asked if I could make a card with is. I did. Then she fixed her sentence: S went to the horse is house.