The Evolving Homemaker

Not to disappoint, I am passing on a few of the activities my son has been partaking in to get those reading juices flowing without him having to follow an arbitrary workbook or force himself to read a book he has no interest in reading.  It seems to be working quite well, while I didn’t have him read a book for a month, last week I pushed one of the ones that came in our curriculum at him and he read the first story with no problem at all!

Today I will take him to the bookstore and let him pick out level 1 readers that HE wants, not that MOM wants him to read, but that HE wants to read.  After talking to his enrichment teacher, she said he is reading great in class!  Now just to find his inner motivation to do it!

Anyway, yes I am excited over his progress, here is one game we have been doing:

He finds two words that rhyme and put them together.  He is reading without really knowing he is reading, and he thinks it is a fun activity, I will change the words out next week to new and a few longer rhyming words.

Yes, that is coffee spilled all over the cards.  They still work.  They just taste better now!

This is a site word activity in which I make two card of each site word and lay one stack out on the table, and keep one in a pile.  My son reads the one in the pile and finds the match on the table.  As they get too easy, we take them out of the pile and move them to our window as a friend suggested!

My son is very proud of his 23, which he counted, words that he considers “too easy”.

Mix up your day and try some of these!  They seem to be working for him!  I am finding that I can’t keep doing the same ‘games’ everyday.  He becomes less motivated with them on the third day, so I am mixing them up now.  A little site word bingo today, a little rhyming matching tomorrow, a little site word matching the next day.

Be flexible!  That is becoming my motto, happily.

Spill it: What ideas do you find useful in keeping your kids engaged in the learning you are presenting?  If you are not homeschooling, what are some tips you have found helpful in working with your kids on reading/phonics at home?

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Obviously, I have a love of books.  Obsession…love…so interchangeable…

I would like to be able to pass on my love of words to my children.  If they latch on to it great, if not, that is alright too I suppose.  But I would be sad that they will miss out on so many adventures and tales that are sure to expand what they think of the world and what they think about themselves.

But we can’t have everything as parents can we?  Might as well learn that little factoid now.

But last week, a dear homeschooling friend passed on this fabulous blog to me that I found fascinating and I will be doing a multitude of these projects when I get home!  One I have finished already!

The blog is The Snail’s Trail and this little work box activity was so brilliant I was disappointed I hadn’t thought of it myself!  I hit up Home Depot and Lowe’s the very day I discovered it and got to work. Visit her site for the full list of consonants, word families, and diagraphs that I used.

I couldn’t find the long paint chips of seven at any of the stores I scoped, so I used the ones with four paint chips and did my best!  But it was fun, and I can’t wait to get back from vacation and start school with these gems to help us out!

FUN!

So smart and so easy! Enjoy!

Spill it: Any brilliance of ideas/websites you have come across that you wish you had thought of first?  Any fun ideas for passing on the love of reading, if we get so lucky, to your kids?