I received an e-mail from a Mommy Teacher User who was asking for ideas to ease the home school process. When I tried to respond there was an error with her e-mail address; so, I decided to share my thoughts with all of the Mommy (and Daddy) Teachers out there.
On the “Getting Started” page of my website, each subject matter follows a sequence of children’s development. Each activity has ideas on how to make learning FUN for kids. But one thing that I noticed makes learning easier is when you include another child (or more) because children become more engaged with social influence. Activities become more like games with their peers, and adding the social development factor is KEY for home schooled children anyhow. Pair up with another homeschooling mom (two, or three!) and take turns teaching activities… if that is an option.
I have A LOT of ideas…I’d love to share more if you can send me some additional info, for example: What types of activities and content have you been working on with your child so far (ABC’s, Numbers, etc.)? How much time do you spend on each activity? Do you follow a curriculum? Is she the only child you home school?
Occasionally people ask me if I worry about running out of information for this site. My response is that I have an infinate amount of activities and information that I want to post about and if anything I struggle with getting ahead of myself. And I have to confess I already have! I want to show parents the sequence of understanding a child’s development in reading, writing, and math so bad that I want to lay it out post by post. But today, I am stepping back, only SLIGHTLY, to take what I already have introduced and add a lot more activities to it.
For example, I wrote a post not long ago about phonemic awareness, but there is SO much to know about phonemic awareness and there are a few other skills to master before introducing the one I posted about coloring a gingerbread house.
So take a minute, breathe, and brace yourself for a little lesson that is “the secret key to reading success” (as my friend and mentor Beth Yglesias puts it).
Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sounds within a word. To learn this process there is a ladder of skills that must be climbed to achieve the FLUENCY and structure of reading. So here is a visual breakdown for you: Click HERE on Reading Ladder if you cannot read the image below or click on the image itself.
I wanted you to see this so that you would understand the sequence of activities I am posting, Each step needs to be MASTERED before moving up to the next. So I am going to try to post more activities on the earliest steps first to give you lots to practice 🙂
All that to say, I posted an activity recently for a child who has established the Step 5 skill and I skipped an activity for Step 4: Listening for a word in parts and hearing the whole word….so here is an activity for Step 4:
Step four is to be able to listen to the sounds that make up a word such as /c/-/at/ and understand that you are saying the word “cat”
*******When a letter is inside of this symbol “//” you make the letter SOUND not the letter name.
So if I were to show my little one (who can rhyme as well as clap words and word parts) pictures of a cat, a dog, and a fish, and asked him/her to show me the picture of the /f/-/ish/, he would point to the fish.
But this is just the first level of giving him/her a chance to listen for the word parts to hear a word. The next level, after this one is mastered, is to ask him/her to show me the picture of the /f/-/i/-/sh/ and he would hear all those sounds together and point to the fish.
Here is a page of pictures for you to practice the FIRST LEVEL of this skill:
This is one of the first phonemic awareness activities I am posting for pre-readers. If you try to introduce this activity and your little one is not quite getting it, go back to some of the earlier reading posts on the “getting started” page and practice more activities similar to the earlier skills because your little one may need more time playing with words before he/she is ready to listen for the beginning sounds in words.
Listening for beginning sounds, generating beginning sounds, and identifying which letter makes that sound are three SEPARATE skills. So today, we are going to start with the basics of introducing phonemic awareness (which is the awareness that words are made up of sounds).
I created an activity in which you will talk about all the objects in the picture so that you can label the objects with your child BEFORE attempting to listen for the sounds that the words start with. Once children are able to “play” with words enough to hear sounds. They usually hear the beginning sound first, then the ending sound, and then the middle sound(s) eventually. It takes A LOT of practice listening for the beginning sound before a child can hear and distinguish other sounds within a word.
But this is a great place to start:
Click on the link below, print it, read the directions and let your child choose what they want to color with -crayons, colored pencils, markers, etc.
In the last math post “Math Stories” I talked about the importance of hands-on activities when introducing and practicing new skills. And in the post “What’s in a number?” I talked about children needing to see number sets represented in many ways. Today, we are going to combine those two important concepts in a counting activity using their fingers.
Search around your house for something that can fit on your child’s fingers (rings, finger puppets, those Halloween fake finger tips, cubes/blocks that are open on one side, etc.)
Make a group of ten finger-sized manipulatives and ask your child to help you count them out. Then explain to your little one that you want to play a game where you will call out a number and they will place that many cubes on their fingers (one on each finger) using both hands. Then you will ask them to show you that same number of cubes in a different way.
Before you play the game you have to show the child on your OWN fingers. This is important because in EVERY lesson, game, or activity you cant just tell your child what you are going to do…you have to 1) SHOW them. Then, you will 2) play it WITH them. Then you will just 3) TELL them.
This is the “I do”, “WE do”, then “YOU do” method to teaching that is really beneficial for the learner.
So, if I were playing this with my child, I would explain the game. Then I would tell them that if I said the number “3” out loud I would place the cubes on my “right hand thumb, left hand thumb, and left hand pointer finger” while I counted aloud: “One, two, Three” and then I would say “Now watch! I can put three cubes on my fingers in a different way…maybe I can put one on my right hand tall finger, stack one on top of that, and then put the other on my left hand ring finger. Do you have an idea of how I can place these three cubes in a different way on my hands? Show me! Can you show me on your fingers next? Let’s try a new number and we can both put that many cubes on our fingers and surprise each other to see if it looks the same or different. Okay! Now it is your turn to try it by yourself while I call out a number…..”
If you have any questions about this activity or any activity for that matter….
If you read the post “Read the Playroom” you sat back and learned from your child’s abilities to “write.” Today, you are going to do the writing while your little one dictates/tells you what to write. This process is called shared writing and teachers use this all the time to model handwriting and introduce concepts of writing.
Put a poster on the wall at your child’s eye level and tell him/her that you want to make up a recipe together, maybe even one you could pretend to cook after. You need the titles Ingredients and Directions: Let your little one come up with the ingredients and the directions as you write them out. But the key here is to TEACH while you write. You are displaying their words for the household to see so you have that platform to teach while you model the writing process.
Teach them:
1) To start writing on the top, left side so that you will not run out of room. A lot of times I ask my students before I start writing “Should I start on this side (pointing to the right side)? What about down here? Why not?” to get them thinking about why we start writing at the top left.
2) To write one word at a time, leaving nice-size spaces between words.
3) To listen for the sound at the beginning of the words.
Each time you do a writing activity like this with your child, it instills a foundation of print concepts and extends their understandings each time.
I will talk about more print concepts to teach for the writing process in a future writing post.
