This is where I"ve grown. I've learned that if you back off a bit, let them mature a bit, they tend to learn things easier. Before, with any of the others, I would have pushed through. Making school miserable for all of us. I decided that until Christmas we are going to do unit studies, math, and FMS. I decided I wasn't going to worry that she didn't know her letter sounds completely (she can't say them either even when prompted, so I'm thinking there is a connection issue between what is said and what she hears... she's in speech) and that she couldn't sit and listen to the stories. So I stopped.
Last week she started a new game... she wants us to say a word and she figures out what letter it starts with. She can also now figure out what letter it ends with (or sound anyway, but we try to stick with easy CVC words). Some she still has trouble with and can't easily figure it out, I've learned what those are (R, W, Y mainly) and skip them most of the time at the moment.
This week we started our first unit study. For whatever reason I picked flowers. She is picking up on the words in the picture books! Like today, one of the pages said "birds and bees"... she said "I know how to spell birds!!" and she read the letters for the word birds. I was not pointing at the words when I was reading. So the only things I can tell was that 1.)she was listening, 2.)she was listening well enough to know the order, and 3.)she knew that those letters made words. Now it is also extremely possible that she read it, but I'm not counting my chickens
She's also able to color inside the lines now. She's very bendy, so writing/coloring is very hard. I really do not expect much at the moment.... we are working on building those muscles. However this morning she colored a picture so well that I thought her sisters had done it.
I have to give a good deal of credit to this board for my growth. A good bit of it was hearing over and over that a lot of times it's better for them to be in the older age range for a guide. It has helped me so much to not expect that, even though she's been five a couple of months, for her to be able to do LHFHG right now! That it's OK to wait for her to be ready!