Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Some books I've read, albeit a very long time ago.

The first one is called Honey For a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt. It is a book about reading with your children. The second half of the book are lists of books to read for certain age groups. She has so many good books, books I can't wait to read with Brenden. I intend to recheck this book out from the library and start going through some of the books with Brenden. For those who don't read my other blog, Brenden is in the "pre-reading" stage, thanks mostly to Starfall.com. He knows all the basic sounds of the alphabet, he can usually tell you what letter a word starts with if it's not a tricky one. For example, when our friends were over, we asked him what "Shiloh" starts with and he said, "s-h", but yesterday he came up to me and said "phone" starts with an "f" and knife starts with an "n". So you can see, he really knows his sounds but not yet used to the fact that English has so many weird rules and exceptions. So I told him he was really lucky to be learning English, because it can be so tricky. Reading is very important to us. I'm working on writing my own curriculum to teach him some more things than Starfall does and it's just amazing to me that I'm giving him a gift so precious and wonderful. To read and write is something that is often taken for granted, but is the basis for all future knowledge.

The next one is called "Home Learning Year by Year" by Rebecca Rupp. This is my new favorite and definitely one I want to buy. It goes through every grade level and tells the approximate order and age for specific skills to be taught. This is a huge blessing to me, because while I've been determined to homeschool, I don't really know the specifics about the sequence of certain skills. I mean I didn't even know where to start teaching Brenden how to read. First you start with letter recognition, then sounds the letters make, then patterns of words like "_ee_", "_a_e", "_ai_", etc. And it works it's way up. That's the kind of thing that this book teaches with science, math, language arts, social studies, art, etc. So you know what foundations to lay before moving on. Even if you aren't homeschooling, this book is good to look at to make sure your kids aren't falling behind or to help them if they are. Lots and lots of additional resources are listed.

And then the next one is "Homeschooling: Take a Deep Breath-You Can Do This" by Terrie Lynn Bitner. Lots of resources listed, lots of tips about organization, and lots of encouragement. When I first considered the option of homeschooling, I thought to myself, "There is no way I could teach my kids, I'm too stupid. I didn't do well in math and always struggled with science." That kind of thinking. She talks about how to create a lesson plan, how to research facts, how to write your own curriculum if you want (something I was convinced I would never do). And she also talks about how you don't need to know everything, you can learn together with your child. This was by far the best book I've read on how to handle the specific day to day things without getting overwhelmed or frustrated. This really helped alleviate my fears about this massive undertaking we are about to begin.