|
Affiliates
and Advertisers
Help support HSC by shopping through these links.
Advertising
Info
Join our advertisers in promoting your product or service to the
Christian homeschool community.
Almanac
This area is devoted to holidays. Find ideas to make your homeschooling
holidays fun and educational.
HS
Beginner Page
Just getting started? This is a great place to start your research
on HSC.
Calendar
of Events
Check into special guests, chats, and special interviews here.
Chat
Room Link
See our chat schedule for parents and teens.
Christian
Ed Symposium
Read interviews with guests from the homeschool, Christian, and
education communities.
The
Cinema at HS
Links to help you match up your movie watching and homeschooling.
Communications
Center
An index of our message boards, guidelines, and chats.
Curriculum
Ideas
A growing area of curriculum suggestions, as well as ideas on how
to homeschool inexpensively. Realistic, affordable ideas, as well as
reality checks!
DVD
Rentals
Affiliate link to Netflix.
Feature
Page
A refreshing area with ideas about homeschooling. Articles on HSC
and elsewhere to help keep your homeschool Christian.
Homeschooling
FAQs
The hardest part about homeschooling for most is the decision to
start. See what other questions new homeschoolers ask.
Helpful
Links Pages
An annotated list of helpful links to help your Internet research
on a wide variety of subjects.
Internet
Abbreviations
Lost when it comes to message board abbreviations?
Leadership
Position Papers
Opinions, white
papers, and sometimes controversial papers from HSC and others about
homeschooling from a Christian worldview.
The
Library at HSC
Reading lists, book suggestions, and more.
Photo
Album
See who you're chatting
with!
Reviews
Hundreds of product reviews.
State
Laws & Support
Individual pages for states and countries to help you with state-specific
questions, including book suggestions, driver's ed, support groups,
and more.
|
Learning to read is an exciting time for children and their families.
For many parents, helping their child learning to read establishes
a pattern for their involvement in their child's academic education.
Here are a few important hints.
Be
Involved and Patient
Learning to read is the culmination of a great many learned skills
and developmental processes. Learning to read is a long-term program.
At times, there is no visible progress. At other times, they make
dramatic daily progress. In all cases, show patience, confidence,
and be encouraging of new skills. Learning to read is like a marathon
that involves climbing up mountains and over diverse terrain:
it is not a sprint and every child needs support along the way.
Learn
about learning to read
There are many great books and Web sites on learning to read.
While you don't need to become knowledgeable about all the latest
theories about learning to read, there are some basics which you
should understand. While there are many sources, my favorites
are SEDL
or Todays
Learners. Time4Learning has an excellent free
newsletter that provides useful insights into how children
learn to read and how parents can help teach them. It points to
Web sites, articles, resources, and books with more info on specific
steps or issues in learning to read. Once you understand the basic
steps, you'll have a "map" or "schedule" of
the terrain that your marathon mountain climbing effort will need
to cover. If your child's development differs significantly from
the schedules, you should consult with specialists since along
the way, many children are found to have different sets of strengths
and weaknesses which sometimes require some specialized help or
intervention. Most differences provide interesting insight into
what makes your child special and do not change the overall program
significantly.
Learning
to Read has a sequence
Just as children start by playing T-ball before playing baseball
with "pitched" balls, there are specific steps in learning
to read. Trying to teach the steps out of sequence can frustrate
your child (and you). For instance, prior to successfully learning
phonics, the child should master a set of pre-reading skills including
understanding basic print concepts, discerning the sounds, understanding
that words are made up of sounds which they need to think about
as interchangeable parts (i.e.
phonemic awareness), and memorizing the alphabet. To help
parents understand the steps in learning to read, look at The
Reading Skills Pyramid . And while most children do follow
this sequence, be aware that each child is different and that
there are a great number of variations. It is great fun to realize,
even in the prereading phase, how much ground is already covered
once a child can play rhyming games, understanding thousands of
words of vocabulary, and likes hearing you read bed-time stories
out of a book.
|
Learning
to Read is Multimodal
Learning to read is easiest if you involve all the children's
learning
styles and modalities. They should see the words on
wall posters, have toys in the shapes of letters, draw or
trace the letters, play letter games on the computer, watch
educational programs (Sesame Street) that introduce the
letters, and of course, listen to stories in books. Most
children love learning that their name can be written down
and are highly motivated to learn to recognize their own
name. Each of these different activities helps develop prereading
skills.
|
|
A
Program to Becoming a Successful Reader
Time4Learning
is a great example of a reading curriculum. Let's look at the
range of activities that are taught as children learn to "decode
words" and build basic "reading comprehension skills."
These steps are primarily achieved in the years up to third grade.
At the preschool level, lessons teach verbal comprehension, build
vocabulary skills, develop phonemic awareness through rhyming
games, and build other prereading skills. By kindergarten, the
program is teaching phonics with more vocabulary, comprehension,
and listening exercises (recognizing word families and syllables).
By third grade, reading comprehension skills are the main focus
with grammar, word roots, punctuation, and critical thinking as
major strands.
Writing
Skills Should be Developed Simultaneously
Most
programs, including Time4Learning, now include a writing program
from the earliest ages. There are two reasons for this renewed
focus on writing: one, research shows that writing skills helps
build reading skills. Secondly, employers (and standardized tests)
are increasingly focused on strong writing skills. Teaching writing
starts at the prereading level where there are "tell a story"
exercises using paint programs. The level progresses incrementally
so by third grade, the children are using outliners and graphic
organizers to organize thoughts prior to writing. The goal is
for them to construct sentences and paragraphs into coherent clear
essays.
Helping
your Child Learn to Read - Summary
Parents
enthusiasm for teaching their children to read should be channeled
into useful daily activities. Meaningful education is a marathon
and not a sprint; it is not always smooth "road work"
but involves working through diverse terrain. Be very dubious
of any "magic shortcuts." The first step is for parents
to learn the basics of the steps in learning to read. Once you
understand the overall path, you'll see how to use the broad array
of tools such as learning toys, computer programs, rich daily
conversations, daily reading sessions, and a comprehensive curriculum.
By John
Edelson, Time4Learning Founder - Interactive
Homeschool Curricula
Questions/Comments?
E-mail Site Administrator
Copyright
March 9, 2007 © Homeschool Christian.com and Time4Learning
Web Design & Maintenance: Argiope Web Systems
|
