Reading with Junior Part 2 & a Little Math

This is a post from a few years ago that I realized I had never posted.  
I thought I would share a little of what has worked with Junior and how he made the connection from letters to words.
When we started teaching Junior sounds we did not teach him the letter names. I wanted it to be as simple as possible and not confuse him. It took lots of repetition but pretty soon he was getting that a specific letter made a specific sound the problem was that was as far as it got. It had no meaning for him that some shape on a paper made a certain sound. Even when we started putting letters together to make words it wasn't really clicking. c-a-t says cat, so what. The breakthrough came one day when we were working on the words and my niece was here. I asked her to go get something to signify each word. Something concrete that Junior could touch and see, it worked and since then we have been able to just use pictures for him to make the connection and then phase those out once he learns the words. It is still slow go but he is getting there.

Numbers came much easier for Junior. When he was little we counted everything. As with letters it took some time for him to understand that the printed number meant something. We did lots of number and object matching using his favorite toys. Keeping his interest was the key. We would play with his cars and then match sets to the actual numbers. Now he has moved on to addition and he does quite well.