..and she is reading!

We just hit a milestone people.. Mahnoor read her first word list today mashallah.. all by herself.. I am thrilled *pats self on back*

When Rashda Aunty and myself got thinking about the learning modules, our focus was on achieving quick results.. we figured it would be best not to dwell on learning and recognizing the entire Urdu alphabet before moving on to connecting them into words. it just makes it more fun for the child to be able to figure where he is headed.

Mahnoor, armed with the knowledge of 6 consonants and a single vowel managed to read a fairly large number of three and four letter words today.

I pulled out my grocery reminder white board from the kitchen; the one she owns has all these cartoon characters cluttering the corners and would have surely distracted her from reading. yes,the kid is fickle that way!

I went ahead to write a big half shape of the consonant in blue followed by a friendly red alif ا and prompted her to read.

Familiar with the phonetic method of reading that she has been using to read English it didn’t take her a minute to be able to figure how sounds put together form words. Her excitement, the look of triumph at being able to spell out words that she actually knew of was a such a treat! Some words did need to be explained though.

We went at a furious pace, I wrote, she read, I erased and wrote again; stopping only to talk some about the new word or to haul the little sibling out of the corners and  weird places she’d had crawled to in this while.. yup, never a dull moment!

Mahnoor earned herself a star for every word she got right at the first go.The best part was that she even managed to read the word شاباش “shabash” that I scribbled in the end to reward the brilliant job she had done at reading!

Just as we we were done reading the final list of words, Umar walked in and Mahnoor put together a repeat performance for a very thrilled dad. Of course بابا (baba) was the favourite word for both of them on the list