Today was a most productive session with Nicholas. We began by using alphabet cards and asking Nicholas to identify seven letters and articulate the sound of each. We reviewed which letters made the bounce sounds ('P' and 'T') and those that made the stretch sounds 'N','S','L''A'and 'F'. He particularly enjoyed emphasizing the staccato-sounding bounce sounds. Nicholas was next tasked with matching pictures to the name of their corresponding (7) letters, with improvements noted over the past few sessions. Nicholas succesfully accomplished this task, but needed prompts for "tiny turtle'- growing a bit frustrated when we could not find "lazy lion" amongst the pictures in the batch. We then moved on to environmental print pictures for the letters 'N,' 'S,' 'L,' P,'A,'and 'T'. Nicholoas was able to match and articulate 6 stretch sounds (such as 'Sssssstop' and 'Lllllucky Charms,' and 2 bounce sounds ('Pppppizza Hut' and 'Ttttttelevision'. He did well on all, but questioned and hesitated before matching television to the picture of a Target store. Please note that Nicholas was permitted to indulge in short bursts of elective activity in between tasks to facilitate his attention, which helped him to sustain it for the duration of the session. Next on the agenda, Nicholas was asked to match capital and lower case letters. He enjoyed punching the letters out of their foam-based template and was asked to match environmental pictures with their corresponding letter mates. Nicholas achieved this task with 85% accuracy, which included success with the letter'f' for the very first time. He did, however, require prompting for the letter 'N', asking "is it the letter that my name starts with?" before committing to identifying and matching it. Despite his initial reluctance and prefacing performance by saying, "I don't know how to do this, or "I never did this before", Nicholas did as instructed with good accuracy and success. Overall, he enjoyed matching upper case letters to their 'best friend' lower case letters and having the magnets stick together more than he did the decoding activities or tasks having him match words to their pictorial counterparts, including the environmental print words (signs, labels, and trademarks). Next, to consolidate the recently acquired letter 'F' sound, we used a fun little song in which the letter sound was exaggerated, or stretched. Nicholas enjoyed piping in the 'f' words after hearing it and singing it together a few times. We also sang a Jingle Bell song, in which we substituted the letter 'f' for the beginning letters of each word. Nicholas had a bit more difficulty with this activity, but got a huge kick out of hearing this tutor singing "Fingle Fells, Fingle Fells, Fingle fall the fay" - trying to chime in as requested, but reverting to the original, and laughing at our dual comedic performance. It was a delightful way to end a most productive session. We enjoyed a good laugh and ate some popcorn to celebrate gains made in on-task performance, sound-letter correspondence, and increased phonemic awareness.