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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

You Might Be a Homeschooler if:


"You get light headed in teacher supply stores."

When I became interested in homeschool, my fear was that I would have trouble finding out "how" to do so. Little did I know, the challenge with homeschooling is not a lack of information, but an abundance of information that is difficult to choose from!

I am still investigating kindergarten curriculum and I have found every opinion on it from "kindergartners don't need a curriculum at all" to "kindergartners need 3 hours of school time a day." I am sure the answer falls somewhere in the middle, right?

Furthermore, my homeschooling adventure waxed even more interesting when I decided to sit down with Noelle in order to "introduce" her to her first set of Dolch Sight Words. I didn't want to overwhelm her; nevertheless, she knows what sound each letter makes and is starting to sound out some basic words. Thus, I thought knowing some more sight words would boost her confidence when reading.

I sat down with her and to my amazement this happened:

Me (lifting up the card with the word "the" on it) Do you know what this says?

Noelle: "the"

Me: (lifting up the card with "is" on it)"Do you know what this says?"

Noelle: "is"

Me: (lifting up "go", then "I", then "me" etc...etc...)

Noelle: "go", "I", "me"

I showed her about 14 words and she only hesitated on 1! Who knew?! Needless to say, she read a Theme 1 Houghton Mifflin Phonics book yesterday.

My guess is that between my reading aloud to her and the endless hours she spends on Starfall, she has committed to memory way more phonics than I realized.

What about you? What were your experiences with teaching your child to read?

9 comments:

  1. Hey Lasandra! Yay for Noelle!!! She is one smart cookie!! One of my M.A.s is in Learning Disabilities, so I have alot of resources about different ways to teach reading! Alot of the strategies, etc I use for my students are ones that many of the early lit curriculums use for "regular ed" emergent readers (pre-k and k). If you want, I can point you to some really great vocab and early lit resources!

    God Bless,

    Jordan

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  2. Good job. It seems you have navigated the abundance of resources. When reading be sure to point out features of print like the sentence structure, capital letters, and punctuation. Also, if she has a favorite book let her read it to you by using the pictures. Also, books of tape and big books are good tools. Don't forget those writing skills! Have her write her name every day and help her to write notes to daddy or grammy or other people she wants to communicate with. I should be a home school consultant!

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  3. Sounds like you are on a roll. For several of our youngest children we have been using this

    http://donpotter.net/PDF/Word%20Mastery%20-%20Typed.pdf

    And before we used that, we mostly used McGuffey. I have found that in keeping things simple that everything goes more smoothly!! My experience anyway.

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  4. Dear One,
    May you have a truly sweet and blessed Valentine's Day!

    God Bless you,
    d

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  5. Yes! How exciting for Noelle and for you!

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  6. Hey Jordan! That info sounds great! Thanks!

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  7. Tricia,

    I'm going to take a look at those resources. Thank you.

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  8. So true,there is so much to choose from that my mind is reeling!But the good thing with having a VERY limited budget is that sometimes the choice gets taken away from me so it makes it easier to choose LOL.I asked for 'inexpensive' kindergarten curricula a while ago on FB and only one eprson gave me what is truly cheap for my personal circumstances.The rest..nah.

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Your ideas, questions, and comments are welcome!