All About Reading - Level 1

I'm am far and away from being an expert, but after teaching four kids to read, I'm a firm believer that some kids just "get it" quicker than others.  I also know that in our house, what worked for one didn't necessarily work well for all.

I think a firm foundation in phonics is really important, but I also don't want to turn reading lessons into drudgery.  The whole idea is to inspire a LOVE of reading, and in most cases, that's a tricky balance.

When Emma entered kindergarten last year, I began researching through the loooong list of current reading programs.  I was immediately drawn to All About Reading, and was really inspired by the overwhelming number of blog posts and reviews singing its praise.

I'm jumping on that bandwagon today to share a little bit about why I too love ALL ABOUT READING.

Emma attended a kinder program outside our home, so I started Level One as an after-school program with her last fall.  She tired really quickly the first half of the year, so we took it super slow.  

The format of this program is very easy to divide for learners like Emma who need to ease in slowly.  

The main teaching is done from a magnetic white board, with little magnetic letter tiles that are moved around to build words.  Right off the bat, I love this multi sensory approach to learning!  She can MOVE and participate....not just sit and listen!  She is building the words herself to actually see the concepts in action, without a lot of pen and pencil work to bog her down.  It's brilliant!

There are phonogram cards and word cards that we keep in a little file box to introduce new concepts and review, review, review.

Lessons are scripted in the Teacher's Manual, so it is an "open-and-go" program.

Level one has three hardback readers.  The stories are engaging and well illustrated.

Many of the lessons have some form of hands on activity.  Here is Emma earlier this year flipping fried eggs to play a word game.  These quick and easy activities are FUN, so often times we set them aside and play them a few days in a row.  This is a natural confidence booster, because after playing the game repeatedly it becomes easy, and she gets so excited about how quickly she can recall the answers.  (I want to mention that these games and activities are provided right in the lesson book.  You tear them out, and with very minimal work, are ready to roll.  Some require a few minutes of cutting, and maybe a glue stick.  In this instance, I grabbed a spatula for the kitchen to make it more fun, but I'm NOT running through the house gathering a long list of supplies or spending excessive amounts of time preparing for these lessons.  If you keep scissors and a glue stick with your reading supplies, you're set!) 

Here she is matching mittens for a kitten.  These quick and simple games keep her so engaged and make the learning fun.

Most lessons have fluency sheets for extra practice.  I found that in kindergarten she just wasn't ready for long and challenging lessons, especially after a full day at school.  So, we just broke it down into parts and worked slowly.  We may have worked on the white board one day, reviewed our cards the next few days, read a story from the reader, repeated the story, repeated the story again, then took several days to work our way through a fluency page.  By the end of kindergarten, we made it half way through Level One, which was the right pace for her at the time.

We picked at it a tiny bit over the summer, mainly just to stay familiar with the word cards and not lose any ground.  Once kindergarten ended I found she was much more capable of making it through a complete lesson in a day or two. 

By the start of first grade in homeschool she was ready to take off.

Reading is one of her favorite subjects during the day.  She never complains about it.  (Hooray!)

This week we studied compound words by matching birds on a branch.

Fun, fun, fun!

This program is clever, without being overly complicated.

Here she is "dividing" compound words with a dull butter knife. :-)

One of my favorite things about this program is how easy it is to apply the gas or the brakes.  When she gets it, we sail on.  When she struggles, there is plenty of review built in, and we just park for a few days until we have it and are ready to move forward again.

One day she had a story in her reader about a boy who carried his lunch in a sack on a stick.  So I delivered her lunch to her like this.....so fun!

My favorite thing over-all about this program?

SHE LIKES TO READ!! And that is the whole point.

We were studying apples in science a few weeks ago, and she ran upstairs to get the book "Ten Apples Up On Top".  She brought it down and read it out loud to me spontaneously.  Her confidence (and ability!) grows day by day.

We are just a few short lessons away from completing Level One.  I have ordered Level Two and it should be here any day.

I'll admit that teaching reading isn't my favorite thing.  It's so much PRESSURE.  It's such an important subject, and we have had more than our fair share of struggles in this area throughout our homeschooling years.

All About Reading is BY FAR the most pleasant and rewarding experience I have ever had with teaching reading.  I LOVE THIS PROGRAM, and am anxious to see what Level Two has in store.

As I mentioned, I think reading readiness varies a lot from kid to kid.  Some are more interested than others.  Perhaps Emma falls on the "easy" side in this area, but I credit both her progress and her enthusiasm to a program that has been a delight for both of us.

Keep up the good work, Emma!

The Easter Bunny Lives in Our Homeschool Room

I absolutely love Dr. Suess.  One year when she was really small, Emma received this in her Easter basket....

She named him "The Easter Bunny".

(?????)

Fast forward many months....my Mom is here babysitting one night and it is time for Emma to go to bed.  Emma asks to sleep with "The Easter Bunny" and is completely unwilling to settle for anything different.  My Mom searches high and low for a rabbit, as Emma's frustration escalates.

Gee....how come Grandma couldn't figure out that this was the requested creature?  What's wrong with Grandma, anyway?  Ha!!!!  We have laughed and laughed over that one.  We arrived home that night and my poor Mom was frazzled and beat.  Emma was old enough to say "Easter Bunny!!" again and again, but not old enough to describe or explain to my Mom what she meant.  The more animals Mom offered, the more upset she got that Grandma couldn't get it right.

Emma recently added the Easter Bunny to the give away basket.  I'm not a big saver, so it's highly unlike me to dive in and rescue something my kids are ready to pass along, but there are far too many precious memories attached to this guy.  Since I love Dr. Suess books, I decided he should live in our homeschool room, so my husband posed him in the window above the homeschool room door, and this is my view everyday from my chair.

Life is good.  Hard to be too crabby about much of anything with the Easter Bunny keeping watch.  ;)

FIAR: The Rag Coat

When I first previewed this book, it didn't grab me.  I read as many of the FIAR books as I could when I bought my FIAR manual to decide which ones I really wanted to row.  This one didn't make the short list.  At first I found it sad, and almost burdensome for a child.

However, I'm so glad I went back for a second look, because this one is a sweet and tender gem and it would have been a real shame to miss it.  We completed this row September 1-5, 2014.

I do not own this book, so we took a little trip to the library to borrow it.

It was a beautiful day, so we sat down at the pond behind the library for our first reading of Rag Coat together.  Several visitors showed up to join us!

I found many go-along books to enrich our study.  I am an avid quilter, so I was particularly eager to share books relating to the quilting theme.

And in fact, quilting served as the inspiration for many of our projects.  We loved the book The Quilting Bee by Gail Gibbons.  Following a pattern from the book, I cut out pieces to the Pine Tree quilt block out of construction paper and let Emma put them together like a puzzle.

I also ordered this little sticker book, thanks to a great idea from Rachel at Spark and All.  (This is one of my very favorite blogs for FIAR inspiration.)

Emma worked to create a paper quilt!

She also watercolored a rag coat, which we cut out and used as the cover of our lap book for this unit.

Michelle at Delightful Learning gave me the idea to make a rag doll.  Michelle's blog is the first place I go when planning a FIAR row.  She has a FIAR link up for each of the volumes, and it is so much fun to scroll through and read about what others have done.

Emma had very specific plans for her rag doll.  We googled "images of rag dolls" and combined several of the ideas we found.  First, we went to the fabric store and she selected a delicate, light blue fabric and some pretty lace trim.  I stitched the trim to the bottom edge of a rectangle while Emma ran a gathering stitch around the edge of a muslin circle.  We placed a ball of fiber-fill in the middle of the circle, then drew up the stitches to create a ball shape for our doll's head.  We placed the ball about 1/4 of the way down from the top edge of our fabric, and used that as a guide for where to embroider the doll's face using DMC floss.  This photo shows the placement of the head in relation to the rest of the "body".  (The head gets wrapped completely inside the blue fabric.)

At that point it was just pretty much a matter of gathering the fabric and looping ribbon to make it look like a doll.  I tied a knot around the head, then used the ends of that ribbon to loop around and form "arms".  There is no right or wrong, and we had to work with it for a few minutes to get the proportions correct.  We hand stitched one more short length of lace around the top of the head to make it look like a bonnet.

 

She calls the doll "Bluebell" and is quite fond of her.  She is a sweet keepsake from this row.

We also embarked on a bigger sewing project.  I love to quilt, so I gave Emma a pack of charm squares (5 inch squares of fabric) and let her lay them out in a pattern for a mini-quilt.  I embroidered her name on a block of fabric as well.  I was NOT ALLOWED to give input or advice on fabric selection or arrangement.  ;-)  (Nearly impossible for me to keep my mouth shut!)

Her mini quilt turned out GREAT and we decided to turn it into a huge floor pillow.  She chose a pale blue fuzzy fabric for the backing so it will be super soft and cuddly.  I machine quilted this top and bought a pillow insert.....but this project is still sitting on my sewing desk waiting to be finished.  It isn't for lack of her asking.  ;-(   Unfortunately, this is the fate of many a quilting project....

I will have to update the blog with one more picture when I (hopefully soon!) complete her pillow.

We also took to the kitchen a bit for this row.  I found a recipe for Coal Cookies at food.com.

We were supposed to squeeze them in our hands when they came out of the oven to make them look even more like lumps of coal, but that seemed a little gross to me, so we just left them as they were.  I thought they looked coal-ish enough!

At week's end, we made an Appalachian supper......a wonderful casserole (with a few slight changes) and an apple crisp from the FIAR cookbook.  The casserole was a huge hit with my family.

I went to www.teachcoal.org and requested some coal samples.  They came very quickly in the mail, and I was so impressed by their generosity.  We watched several videos on youtube about coal mining, and it was very interesting to compare the various types of coal.  We also googled and gathered some facts so we could do some US map work about which states produce coal.

Some other highlights from our week:

Aussie Pumpkin Patch offers some wonderful printables for this book, as well as Homeschoolshare.

We studied Joseph's Coat of Many Colors in Bible this week, and made a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting the two stories.

We listened to dulcimer music on YouTube (LOVED this) and enjoyed it so much we studied a bit about how dulcimers are made.

We also listened to Dolly Parton sing "Coat of Many Colors"...brought me right to tears!

Emma did a beautiful narration of this book for me, and I sat at the keyboard and typed what she said word for word.  I printed that on pretty paper and placed it in our scrapbook.  This is such a touching and poignant story, and to read it through the most precious words of a six year old is a very special treasure.

Again, I'm so happy we did not miss this book.  There is a quiet gentleness to it that made me really stop and give thanks for many simple pleasures in our lives.

FIAR: Harold and the Purple Crayon

We rowed Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson the week of September 15-19, 2014.

I originally planned this row for this week because I thought it would be "light".  There are not quite as many suggestions in the FIAR manual, and since we had just completed three activity-heavy book studies in a row, I thought this would be a bit of a break week.  As we got going, the ideas kept flowing, and it was anything BUT a "light" week!  But we sure had fun with the color purple.

We started Monday morning with a grape juice snack.  (She wasn't a fan.)

We did a lesson from art projectsforkids.org in our art journal about drawing a house with some perspective.  She did great, and even colored hers purple!

This precious, classic tale is about a little boy named Harold who actually draws the story as it unfolds.  The illustrations are delightfully simple, which completely adds to the charm and character of the book.  You just can't study this book without creating your own story board, so I provided the canvas (a paper roll from Ikea) and lots of purple utensils, then invited Emma to create, create, create!!

Max even stopped in to add a few things.  I love how she is giving him directions while eating her snack.  (There is a Trix yogurt that is half pink and half blue.  If you stir it together you get purple yogurt....sort of.  What I won't buy to fit in with a theme.....)

I can't believe I didn't take more detailed pictures of her completed mural.  It hung in our kitchen for a few weeks, and then I chopped a few pieces out of it to put in our scrapbook.  She did a great job, and to go along with this we watched videos on youtube about how crayons are made.  (There are several good ones.)

Then we conducted a little purple experiment....

Blue water in one glass, red water in one glass, and an empty glass in the middle.

Twist two paper towels.

Place one going from the red water to the empty glass.

Place the other going from the blue water to the empty glass.

Wait.

The water "travels" along the paper towels and fills the empty glass with....

.....purple water!  (The purple was super dark, so we submerged another paper towel to test the color.  Sure enough...purple!)

Harold draws the moon, which is rather central to the story.  So, we checked out several books about the moon and studied the phases of the moon the fun way....with OREO cookies!!! 

We enjoyed these cookies dipped in Moon Milk.  :-)

Harold also draws several pies, which led us to a fun study of fractions.  I made six different fraction "pies" out of paper plates, and found LOTS of cute books about fractions at the library.

This one was my hands down favorite.

It was fun to study fractions using the plates, and it just so happened that this concept popped up this week in our math book!  I just LOVE those happy coincidences!

I never know if some of my ideas will "fly" or not.......For this book, I copied some of the simple illustrations onto card stock using a purple marker.  I laminated the cards, and asked Emma to do some simple story sequencing with them.  She did have fun with that, but the cards themselves surprisingly turned into a huge hit. We made up games all week long with the cards, and she used many of them as patterns to copy onto her "Emma and the Purple Crayon" mural.

I wish I was more artistic....I would like to attempt more story cards in the future, but this book was incredibly simple to copy and I don't think I'll get that lucky again!

Another big hit.....

We went on a purple scavenger hunt in our house.  We gathered 33 purple items!!  That was more than I had hoped for.  We put them in a tub, and spent days classifying them in all different ways.  (This concept went along nicely with our science studies, because we have been discussing animal classifications.)  We also played several rounds of a memory game.  I would ask her to choose a few items to place in the bucket.  Then she would close her eyes and I would remove one item.  She would have to study what was left in the bucket and tell me which item was missing.

Interesting fact......she could do it every single time with five and six items in the bucket.  When we reached seven items, it was repeatedly difficult.  I thought it was fascinating that seven items was the very definitive threshold.  

Anyway, it was fun to have a collection of "purple junk" on the table all week, and at our purple party Friday night we spread it all out and used it as our centerpiece!

One day Emma found this plate on her desk, along with some red and blue paint.

I gave her a piece of heavy card stock and encouraged her to just paint something abstract, but she wanted to make "something real", so we googled lots of pictures of purple things. She settled on a painting of a purple martin bird.  I get a real kick out of how serious she takes things.

For me personally, the highlight of the week was PAINTING PURPLE PUMPKINS!!!  Pumpkins were just starting to make an appearance at the stores.  My sweet mom went out looking for pie pumpkins.  (Not too big, not too small.)  I pulled out several shades of purple acrylic paint and she set to work.  I loved, loved, loved this.

We delivered one to a special friend as a birthday surprise.  The other two are currently living on my mantle in a pile of fall leaves.  They make my soul SING every time I look at them!!!

Purple pumpkins!

I heart homeschooling.  :-)

Naturally, the pumpkins were on display at our end of the week purple party. We hung the mural in the window with two strands of purple Christmas lights from Dollar Tree, and purpled the table the very best we could.  What a FUN color to go crazy with!

Our menu included purple drinks....

Chicken pot pie, Cheeseburger pie, and strawberry pie.

(Since Harold drew nine pies, we needed to have plenty of pie.)

We also had purple jell-o and GREEN salad (because I could not help myself).

Campbell's Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger Pie

1 pound ground beef, browned and drained

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 cup Velveeta shreds

3 shakes Worcestershire sauce

Combine above ingredients.

Place one roll of crescent dough in bottom of baking dish, and bake about 6 minutes.

Spoon filling into dish and top with a second can of crescent roll dough, sealing edges to form a pie.

Bake until the top is golden brown and the dough is fully cooked.

Quick as a Whistle Chicken Pot Pie

1 rotisserie chicken, shredded

1 can cream of potato soup

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1/2 cup milk (or cream)

1 can Veg All or one bag steamed veggies, plus extra frozen peas

thyme and pepper to taste

Mix together and place in greased, deep baking dish.

Cover with single pie crust, cutting slits to vent.

Bake at 375 until crust is done.

Kraft Easy Spring Pie

1 1/2 cups boiling water

2 packages (small size) flavored Jell-o

1/2 cup cold water

1 graham cracker crust

1 tub Cool-Whip

Stir boiling water into jell-o until dissolved, at least two minutes.  Add enough ice cubes to cold water to measure 1 1/2 cups.  Add to jell-o, stir until ice is completely melted.  Remove 2 cups of the gelatin and place in small bowl.  Refrigerate 5 minutes or until gelatin is the consistency of unbeaten egg whites.  Carefully spoon into crust.  Refrigerate at least 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, add 2 cups whipped topping to remaining gelatin; stir with wire whisk until well blended.  Refrigerate 10 minutes or until mixture is thick and will mound.  Carefully spoon over gelatin layer in crust.  Refrigerate at least 3 hours until firm.

I used strawberry jell-o and an off-brand graham crust.  I wasn't super crazy about the pie, mainly because the crust got super soggy.  I went back and read reviews online, and I think I would try this again using a shortbread crust and peach jell-o. I think the recipe has potential!  :-) 

Although the week turned out busier than I expected, we both THOROUGHLY enjoyed this book.  There were many other Harold titles at our library, as well as several of the stories on DVD, so that provided relaxing evening entertaining.

I'm finding that as we finish a row, I have a hard time placing the books back on the shelf.  I get really attached to the stories and all the fun activities.  I'm so thankful for the memories we are making!  I have read Harold books to my kids for years, but now they are special to me in a whole new way.  The good news is there are so many more fun books still to row!!