Sight Word Driving: An Active Reading Game

sight word reading game
  The ability to decode words you don’t know is an essential part of reading. That’s why children need a basic understanding of phonics. But you can’t sound out every word, and you want to get to the point where you can read fluently without stopping to sound them out, so your child must also
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Growing Your Child’s Vocabulary Organically

vocabulary
  Recently, as we were en route to a camping trip, my six-year-old wondered how much longer the ride would take. Instead of asking, “Are we there yet?” she said, “How much more time until we reach our destination?” My husband and I chuckled at her choice of words, but we weren’t surprised. In addition,
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Reading Should Count as Schoolwork

count as schoolwork
  “Reading through the Lord of the Rings should count as schoolwork,” or so said my 13-year-old son just now. Although I don’t plan on letting him follow Frodo and Pippin’s adventures to the exclusion of all else, he does have a point. Long ago, about the time I first devoured the Lord of the
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Tea Time is Read Aloud Time

read aloud
  When my children were younger, I struggled to keep everyone at the table at the same time. Living books were important to me, but my rambunctious bunch wouldn’t quiet down. I was okay with them playing with LEGOs® or squishing clay while I read, but quietly? That seldom happened. At that time, only one
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Training Children to Remember What They Read – Part Two

remember what they read
  In our previous post, we evaluated our reading worldview and the foundation for trading-in our default forgetfulness for strong reading habits. For illustration, I will use Daniel DeFoe’s classic, The Swiss Family Robinson, for practical tips on training children to remember what they read. Draw Pictures Research has suggested the memory retains images better
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Training Children to Remember What They Read – Part One

remember what they read
  “You and I remember only what we know, and we know only what we remember.”1 This quote, hidden between the black cover ends of a 1943 book bearing the title How to Remember Names and Faces by Robert H. Nutt, has challenged my approach to reading. As an avid reader who relies on the
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Blossoming: Letting God Lead the Way

trust
  In the fall, I wrote this post about my son and how he had finally begun to recognize some words on sight, after three years of phonics instruction. I’ll admit that I thought it would all be smooth sailing from that point on. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite that simple. Despite being
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What Every Pre-Schooler Needs

preschool
  Even in homeschooling, many preschool curriculums and learning resources focus on early reading skills, such as learning the alphabet and letter sounds. Some include basic math activities such as counting to 100 and single digit addition up to 10, sometimes not even using pictorial representations of numbers. Preschool curriculums for homeschoolers often have weekly
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