Isabelle: Underestimated Scholar of the Year!

To think I didn't believe Isabelle would ever learn to read! She is proof that with a little bribery and a lot of patience, almost every large parrot can learn :)

Last week I decided we needed to wrap up the rest of her uppercase alphabet, since we're going to be testing soon. She learned V, X, Z and Q pretty quickly - and then I added th, ch, sh, wh, qu, etc. just to make sure she was good to go on basic phonics.

Sweet Isabelle is such a second born. She learns quickly, but probably not as thoroughly as Ellie. With this cutie, I'm in catch-up mode. I only have so many creative brain cells at my disposal, and they seem employed keeping up with Ellie and running a business.  I didn't pair every single letter with a vocabulary word as she learned, she hasn't seen many Youtube videos about elephants or ducks, as I did with Ellie. But, we manage!

And oh does she manage! The Underestimated Scholar Of The Year Award Goes To.... Isabelle!

Having taught her the uppercase alphabet, I grabbed a few of Ellie's library books so she could start reading actual pages. And then remembered.... books include lowercase letters. Which she doesn't know. *sigh*

My poor second-born parrot.

SO. Now we are rushing through her lowercase letters. Not only does she keep up with learning four new letters each day, she excels! She's also reading sentences!

For both Isabelle and Ellie, I've realized that having them pre-read the sentences before having to make a selection improves their accuracy. Also, I'm writing out Dr. Seuss stories onto flash cards. It's a great way to have fun sentences and topics, without the dilemma of OMG ALL THE WORDS ON THE PAGE! Ellie had 100% accuracy last night on one of her stories (8 sentences), and Isabelle did really well in this video too!

Once they've mastered these sentences, I'm going to try to generalize it to the actual book page - they'll probably have memorized the story by then, and I'll help them to be able to read the sentences in the book :)

Here's Isabelle for a whole training. She reviewed a, b, d, and e from the day before, learned f, g, h, and l, then read lowercase words like a boss! And THEN she read a story with sentences!

Go Isabelle!!!