Last weekend we had our five-year-old grandson spend the night with us all by himself—no siblings—and we LOVED it. One thing he wanted to do was type on my computer. He sat at the counter while I made lunch, and we had the best time talking about letters, words, and typing tricks. I knew I wanted to share with you how it went, because he made so much academic progress while eagerly working at my keyboard.

Initially, I wasn’t so sure this would go well.

My grandson was adopted as an infant, and he was drug addicted because his mom was using even just before his birth. He had a rough first year, but his parents and extended family loved him and prayed for him, and he’s pretty darn close to perfect today.

I’m fairly certain he has dyslexia. So, I began doing Book Bums’ Little Letter Learners (LLL) lessons with him, over a year ago. We first met at Book Bums; but then he moved and changed preschools, so we began meeting, every Friday morning, at the 12 Stones coffee shop in Franklin, Ohio. Each week, I’d tuck a LLL bin into the back of my Jeep and set out to pick up my Little Letter Learner.

We went through every LLL lesson and even did many lessons twice, because though he worked very well and thoroughly enjoyed our time together, the letter sounds and names just weren’t sticking. I did all the things—and his mom was a teacher and a tutor at Book Bums for years, so he had lots of good instruction. I just wasn’t seeing him putting all the pieces together to read.

Every single time he came to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, we did some fun-focused explicit instruction around how words work. One day, he did read a handful of words like pop and dad, but even that required a little bit of prompting to remind him of the letter sounds.

Until this weekend. He wanted to write words using my computer.

I had been skeptical because though I’d taught him the uppercase letters, our primary focus was on lowercase letters. Remember, as few as 2-4% of words in the texts we read have uppercase letters, so that decision was a practical one. Anyway, because a computer features uppercase letters on the keys, he’d have to connect the lowercase image in his memory to an uppercase letter on the keys. A few times, I had to show (by writing it in the air) or describe what an uppercase letter looked like, but he did really well.

This turned out to be fantastic practice, because when he found the uppercase letter and pressed the key, the lowercase letter showed up on the screen. This was a wonderful win I hadn’t considered.

Initially, he spelled his name. Then he wanted to write something else. I demonstrated how to say the word as we normally would and then stretch the word out in slow motion so we could hear each sound. I directed him to, as he stretched the word out, type the letters that corresponded with each of those sounds.

dog /d/-d, /o/-o, /g/-g

With every word he wrote, his enthusiasm grew.

These are the words he spelled. I even introduced the digraph c-h, /ch/!