One of our evening routines with Jin is StoryPress. It started partly as a test, and she has now made it through more than three books.
I open the website or the app on my laptop or tablet, and she takes it from there. She listens to the day's words and reads them back, traces the letters, and picks the right word card by listening carefully to the sound. Sitting beside her every day, I notice small changes I can actually see.
The step she found hardest was Spell it. Under the picture on each word card, there are blank boxes, one for each letter. She listens to the word, finds the right letters from the ones on the side, and drags each one into its place. She needs to work out how the word is spelt, not just recognise the alphabet, so at first she could rarely complete it on her own. But she has been practising blending sounds at school, and we practise too when I read to her at home. Little by little, she seemed to get the hang of it.
Now she breaks the word apart on her own, saying “d, d” or “a, a” under her breath, and finds the letter that matches each sound. Vowel teams and the e at the end of a word are still hard to work out, but she handles CCVC, CVC and CVCC words well.
Once she has listened to the story created for her and finished the colouring page, the day's learning is done. Sometimes she also chooses a word at a fork in the story, which decides where the story goes the next day. Jin always makes the same choice. “I like home!” she says, and the story carries on indoors.
Jin used to run off as soon as the day's lesson was over. Lately, though, she has fallen for the StoryPress Playground. Every day she moves between the mazes, crosswords and word puzzles her dad made, and the many colouring pages. The colouring pages can be printed out too, so she has already picked a few for me to print.
Fixing, tidying and changing things every day is part of our routine. Watching how she actually uses it, and checking whether anything is hard for her, is learning and play for her, but for us it is also work. I get to watch my child even while I'm working. What a good thing that is.
If you'd like to try StoryPress, you can sign up through StoryPress at the top right of this page and create your first book for free.
Yussi
Writer · Social work student, Massey University
A mother of three girls and a Korean immigrant making Mairangi Bay home — writing about starting school, home learning and everyday life on Auckland's North Shore.
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From our family · StoryPress
Every child has a story. Let them write it.
A five-year-old's daily sentence, growing word by word.
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