July 18, 2012 - Posted by Amy- 3 Comments
Last week at the library I was browsing the children’s fiction picture book section. My eyes fell on these two books, which were displayed face-out on the shelf. Perfect. Classic children’s stories my kids don’t know yet. What I love about this author is that he tells the stories in a traditional way, without throwing [...]
July 15, 2012 - Posted by Amy- 4 Comments
I hope you are loving this blog series on teaching beginning reading at home! Lydia is just getting started with kindergarten homeschooling, and we are loving it. One huge advantage of homeschooling is that you can customize your teaching style to fit the needs of your child. For example, last week Lydia was working on [...]
July 11, 2012 - Posted by Amy- 5 Comments
After looking at a few options, I decided to use Bob Books, Set 1: Beginning Readers for Lydia’s primary beginning reading text. BOB books come in sets. Here are the books found in Set 1. Today I will show you how I did the very first lesson with the very first book a few weeks [...]
July 9, 2012 - Posted by Amy- 1 Comment
After a month of kindergarten homeschooling, I’m happy to report that Lydia is reading chapter books! Just kidding. Our preschool homeschool approach has been pretty laid-back. We have lots of library visits and discussions about interesting topics. Without using any formal curriculum, Lydia learned the basics: colors, shapes, numbers 1-10, recognizing capital letters, etc. Since [...]
July 8, 2012 - Posted by Amy- 3 Comments
I am excited to tell you that this week I will be writing a series of blog posts on how we are teaching beginning reading as part of Lydia’s kindergarten homeschooling! There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is certainly more than one way to teach beginning reading. I will [...]
May 12, 2010 - Posted by Amy- 1 Comment
What has come over these children, and why are they so interested in raw veggies? Stay tuned….
January 21, 2010 - Posted by Amy- 4 Comments
I majored in elementary education in college, and I think that was a good thing. I am fascinated by watching little people learn. Today Lydia was playing with her Memory cards. I bought these for her two Christmases ago. She’s still not really ready to play the game the way it is intended, but we [...]
September 11, 2008 - Posted by Amy- 4 Comments
I am completely fascinated by literacy development in young children. When I was teaching kindergarten, I wrote my seminar paper on “emergent writing,” which is the writing children do before they do “grown-up writing.” I chose three students in my class and diligently documented how their writing looked over a series of months and what [...]
August 22, 2008 - Posted by Amy- 4 Comments
Since Lydia and I don’t spend a large amount of time with other children her age, I don’t always have a feel for how her cognitive skills compare to theirs. In other words, is she a genius? Whenever she surprises us with something like the next video shows, I am tempted to think so. Video [...]
July 18, 2008 - Posted by Amy- 1 Comment
After naptime each day, sometimes we go sit outside under the maple tree. Today, however, we dodged the heat and stayed inside on the sofa. Lydia loves to “wite” (write). Sometimes, however, she really wants Mommy to do the writing. As you can see, today we delved into literacy, math, geometry, zoology, and psychology (those [...]