My daughter is five and can sound out quite a few words phonetically (cat, pot, net, milk, for example). To encourage her, I have brought home phonics books from the library or tried to get to her play a junior phonics game that we own. It seems that within 5 minutes she is DONE. I am encouraging with praise, but she just seems to be bored–I’d say she correctly sounds out about 70% of the words. How can I encourage her to read more without making it a chore? I read to her as often as possible, but being home with 4 kids makes it tough for alone time, and we, frankly, can’t afford to purchase another reading program/game.

Wow–sounds like she’s really close to figuring it all out. That’s great. Nothing is wrong with only wanting to work on it for a few minutes. In fact, I encourage parents and children to work on it at very short intervals–5-10 min. a day. Keep in mind that most children have an attention span in minutes of about their age. She’s 5 years old, her interest should be somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes, and then she would be interested in moving on to something else. So it sounds to me like she’s doing great. Her naturally curiosity in sounding out this “code” we call language is helping her discover the entire blending process. That’s wonderful! Keep encouraging her to blend letters into words. There are many made up games that you can make yourself that help her associate word families, i.e., placing flashcards on a table as she sounds out the letters and words that make up a word family: mat, sat, cat, rat, bat, etc. Placing these words into groups to form simple stories is the beginning steps of reading. Keeping your books/stories phonetic will help her make the connection between the sounds that all these letters make into words that they can make. There are many wonderful phonetic books available at bookstores, teacher supply stores and the library. There are a few simple sight words that need to be learned in order to make up a complete story, like a, the, is. A few of these they just have to memorize, but keeping it as phonetic as possible will be a great help to her as she continues to figure out the “code”.