Am I the only one who has to sing nearly the entire ABCs to figure out ABC Order sometimes? No, just me? For some reason, a lot of those letters are jumbled up in my brain. Especially j-n. I have to sing it every time for those letters. I’m not sure if practice would help…
Sometimes my kids think school is boring. Not always and not every lesson but overall, they’ve come to think of school as boring. And I hate that for them! Learning shouldn’t be boring! I’m not sure exactly where we are going wrong but I know that introducing more fun activities is going to…
Do you ever feel like your kids need a small review of previous lessons? I was reading with Royal the other day and he just plain forgot what sound -sh makes. He’s a great reader so I was a bit confused. I think he might have been having a brain fart, if you will, but…
When learning to read, it’s all about the tricks. They’re not really tricks, of course, more like little chunks of information to build upon. Digraphs are a chunk of their own, and quite an important chunk! After all, if you don’t learn that ‘sh’ doesn’t say sss-ha, you’ll never be able to figured out that…
What do you do with a child who thinks reading is amazing, pretends to read constantly, yet isn’t quite ready for sounding out words? You teach them sight words! I’m pretty much on board with teaching phonics and that’s how we taught both Royal and Baloo, primarily. We limit sight words and push through with…
Getting kids excited about reading by themselves can be tricky. We spend years and years reading to them and they don’t want that to stop (and rightfully so) but sometimes that also means they resist reading by themselves. My kids are not really motivated readers. They take some prodding. But with easy reader books that…
It’s time for a new theme and one of my favorites – transportation! All week long we will have a great assortment of transportation printables! Don’t miss any by either signing up for the newsletter: Or by keeping an eye on the 31 Days of Printables page! This is another printable I made just…
People all learn in different ways, right? I was the kid in school who pretty much always learned new concepts quickly. I am the person the public school system is designed for. My kids are not. They’re not slow learners they just don’t learn that way. Earlier this year I found Times Tales, which is…
I’ve never been very good at Scrabble even though my mom is a whiz. I’m happy to get a 3 letter word down and she isn’t happy if she doesn’t get at least one BINGO in a game. We’re just on different Scrabble levels. So activities like making a word out of a bigger word…
How do you get your kids interested and invested in reading? I’ve mentioned it a million times now, but again, Logi-Bear is so close to reading. He wants to read and happily works with me, but I feel like he still needs a bit more work with letter sounds before he’s truly ready. But I…
Sometimes you discover an activity that is perfect for your child in every way. It can be a very rare occasion, but when you find it, you have to just do it. Logi-Bear loves dinosaurs, wants to learn to read, has been enjoying sorting into syllable “teams”, and really likes having little cards and booklets…
Handwriting isn’t really a big focus for us in homeschooling but I do want my kids to be able to write legibly. I have horrible handwriting and always have. In fact, my first bad grade was handwriting in 3rd grade. I cried…a lot. Some people have good handwriting and some people don’t. So my goal…