Getting organized

We have been trying to do some 'school work' lately. I think the kids need a little structure, maybe it's me that needs it but they love to do 'school work'.

I found some bins to put their stuff in. Hannah found her beads and wanted to work with them. She decided that she needed to organize them first. So she pulled everything out of it, cleaned out the little box and put everything back in, sorted, all neat and organized "in their spots".

Ben worked on 3-letter words. He has a ring that has a bunch of notecards on it with words with pictures. He put the 3 cards together and then copied it onto his card and drew a picture of the item or animal. His first word was "zoo" then came "cat", "dog" and son on. I think he really wants to learn to read. He has been working on sounds of letters for a couple of weeks pretty consistently. Always asking about the sounds, to hear them and say them over and over. It isn't very often that he wants to write them but I suggested that today and he seemed pretty interested in that. Now he has a nice-sized flip book of short and longer words that he can read. A couple of years ago he started asking about what sound that letter makes but it wasn't as intense as it is now.

Start school...

While we primarily unschool, I decided to try and start teaching them (mostly for Ben) the sounds of some letters. Ben is very close to 'cracking the code' and is so interested in reading. So this is our goal for the next few weeks. We'll see how it goes. I've never taught someone how to read and am not sure how to do it. We've always read a lot and he knows how to recognize his name and a few other words that he sees a lot (Cheerios, Diego, Dora, Hannah, Noah...).

I think it went well. We only did a few letters while we practiced writing them and I hope they remember them tomorrow. If not we'll go over them again. I was trained to teach Johnny Can Spell when I was teaching (a million years ago) and it really did wonders for the little kids trying to learn how to read. However, I was learned in my teaching credential program that there needs to be a good combination of phonics and whole language for the children to be well-rounded and learn how to read. I think we do a good combination, although we haven't started to do the phonics in writing until now. Ben has been interested in sounds but has preferred to do it orally-on the run, in the car, on hikes... so that is how we've done it. I think it's important for him to learn them in writing too so that is what we're doing now. I'll just have to see how it goes, I don't expect it to work immediately.

Ben is also very interested in math and how numbers work so we'll be working on that a bit to see what he wants to learn.