Nourish Your Children

We started seeds for the garden.

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I found a website loaded with free printables. This site offers free homeschool planners, planning tips, calenders,  household planners, and much more.

All kinds of science information, handwriting printables, history documents,  english, art, math helps are available to you.

DonnaYoung.org

The week after Christmas is great for mom. The kids stay busy playing with all their new stuff. School is out and mom can catch up on all kinds of things and plan for the new year.

This costume fit with our school year as we are studying the Middle Ages.  We are using The Mystery of History Vol. II & III  this school year.

Every year for Advent we read one of the books in the Jotham’s Journey series.  The kids look forward to the candles and the story.  The devotional at the end of each day helps me remember Christ at this busy time of year.  This book was a free gift with a book order I placed about 10 years ago from Timberdoodle.  Those people may never know how much they have touched our family year after year.  We then purchased the sequals: Bartholomew’s Passage and Tabitha’s Travels.  All three books are written by Arnold Ytreeide about three children who lives intertwine.  These living books are set in Israel at the time of Christ’s birth.  Daily evening reading at the holiday has become a special tradition.

In our modern days of pocket electronics, hand held devices, texting, and computers correcting, do we really need spelling?

 Spelling is a humble servant needed whenever writing is required. Does the computer know what word you are thinking? Another humble servant that only knows what it is told. I personally love the computer constantly correcting my spelling. I am, in fact, spelling challenged. I do have to pay attention to which word the computer is giving me.  This spell checker does not think ‘texting’ is a word.  I try to carefully proofread.

Consequently, I do have at least one child that is also spelling challenged.  So far, two are excellent spellers.  All three of them hate spelling.  Two because they feel it is a waist of their time writing lists of words which they consistently spell correctly, and the other one because of consistent misspelling.  I had tried several different workbooks.  All the kids learned phonics (very handy for texting).

Someone suggested to me the Spelling Power program.  I was very excited.  I spent hours trying to figure out how it worked.  Made many copies of the pages.  After one year no change.  This program did not teach spelling, it only tested spelling.

The next year I tried W.I.S.E. Guide for Spelling.  I learned all kinds of spelling rules I never knew before.  This is our second year and I love it (the older kids just get it done).   We started at the very beginning of the book so we could all learn the system and because my teenager was misspelling very simple words.  The program is well layed out.  I didn’t have to think up questions on my own.  The practice of prefixes and suffixes helped us a great deal, plus Latin roots, grammar, creative writing, dictation, and lots more. 

I am such a better speller now and so is my “no-longer-spelling-challenged” child (ok, he is still working on it).  He likes the dictionary on his iPod and created a list of difficult spelling words for himself.

Realizing a word  is spelled wrong is an important step in learning.  Even if you don’t know how to spell it, you can at least look it up.  Dictionary skills are very useful, hopefully learned before the electronic devices.  Could the book dictionary become obsolete like the library reference card catalogs?  Yikes!

The bad news- W.I.S.E. Guide is too much for my early readers.  I guess I will be back to workbooks until they get a little older.

What spelling programs have worked for you?

Don’t skip reading readiness!

Children need life experiences before they can understand what the words on a page of a book mean. They need something to attach it to. Little ones can be very curious about so many things. During the “terrific two’s” kids have so many questions.

Discovery

Teaching is so much easier if you can capture a child’s natural curiosity. Does it matter if they are learning about elephants or giraffes or airplanes? The question is “do you have their interest?”A child needs to give their attention in order to learn. Observing life around them and talking about it.

Read books aloud to your child.

I had simple ABC books that I read to my kids before they were 1 year old. We read them over and over again. A – ah – apple, B – bah – ball. They were learning that a letter is a picture of a sound.

We would snuggle together when they woke up in the morning or after nap and read for a few minutes.

Not just reading to them but also they will say the sounds and we can talk about the pictures. They point to a picture and I point to a picture.

And before nap and bedtime. Story books are more calming that sound books.

As your child gets older you can follow the words with your finger to show left to right progression

Simple songs and rhymes help a child to play with sounds in their mouth and their mind.

Too much television can hinder reading because of all the light, flashes, and movement. Children begin to confuse learning with entertainment. They have trouble settling themselves down to read words on a page. It seems boring to them.

When my kids were four years old, I started teaching them simple reading. I went over the sound books to make sure they knew all the sounds of the letters. Then it was a simple step to putting the sounds together to make a word. We used letter tiles to make all kinds of words that had the beginning simple sounds. We stayed at single words until it became easy. We played a game where we would put the words on the floor. They would read the word and then jump over it. Next we moved to simple books like “Jen the hen in a pen” type stuff. Again, I stayed at this step for a long time until it became easy for them.

Different children will progress at different rates.    Some children need more repetition than others.  Different phonics programs apeal to different children depending on their personality type and learning style.  If one program does not seem to be working, try another one.  But don’t throw out the first one, you will probably need it for your next child.  Or you might want to pull from more than one source.

Kids don’t read-to-learn until 3^rd or 4^th grade so you do not need to be in a big hurry to rush them through the stages. Be encourageing to each small step.  You want them to enjoy reading and enjoy the process. Leading to a love for reading.

For more information on personality types and children, Nourish Your Children