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.