This year marked a new school adventure for us. I applied as a teacher at our local Christian school and they offered me a job the following day. I accepted it. This past Friday marked week two of our time there and so far we are LOVING our experience. Why the change? COVID forced many of my clients to make hard decisions about my services and their financial well-being. Hours were cut, monthly income was less, but the bills remained the same. I felt the brunt of it as a cons

Play requires risk. Play requires creativity. Play requires problem-solving skills. Play allows a learner to see and do.

I hope the last part of the title made sense, "from home at school" because parents can have an amazing role in their child's education.

I read Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack of homeschooling on Harvard Magazines website, a day after I began writing a four-part blog series...

The world of curriculum is overwhelming? How a curriculum writer advises curriculum choices.

I was speaking to one of my dearest teacher friends forced home due to the Coronavirus scare that we are currently facing as a world. She joked that she is going to go nuts being shut-in like this! YES! Aren't we all? We are used to visiting our local YMCA two to three times per week, attending a community potluck and Bible study with our church group once a week, library day, and church every Sunday. Life as we know it will continue within the four walls of our home. That mo

Let's get down to the basics and what the research reveals about how to approach teaching a beginning reader to read. It's pretty simple, yet it is a daunting task. Phonics is the foundation that should not be skipped because research reveals that systematic phonics instruction is effective for beginning readers but also to prevent and fix issues readers can and do face. If you want to check out all the places where I've gathered this information be sure to look through each

Last week was rough. My youngest was sick twice and it was all I could do to stay on top of life much less blog posts. As a result, the scheduled "What the Research Reveals" post will have to wait. My goal is to publish it this week, but life with little people is interesting. Sometimes schedules are just thrown out the window for any number of reasons. For example, we were on the verge of being late for church yesterday because of a meltdown my four year-old-daughter had ove

Every language consists of symbols with each symbol representing a sound. In English these are known as letters or letter combinations. In short, that is phonics - "a method of teaching word recognition or decoding that emphasizes the sound-symbol (letter) relationships that exist in a language." (Rasinski & Padak, p.14) Phonics is seeing the symbol (i.e. B) and recognizing it as a letter that makes the sound /b/. Phonemic Awareness is the hearing of this sound. Students hear

You want an environment filled with reading material readers cannot wait to read. The goal is that you reader hears the sound that they're learning in literature. In the beginning of their phonics journey my goal is not mastery. It is simply introduction to the fact that letters represent a sound. At four my little reader is starting to recognize letters and numbers in her little world. ABC books are a big part of that journey! She makes her own ABC book (which I shared in la

My little girl is in Pre-K and does not want to do school most days. If I can get ten solid minutes on letters and numbers I'm absolutely thrilled. But here is the weird thing about her lack of desire to "work" on letters and numbers: if I ask her, "do you enjoy school?" she always says, "Yes!" I don't quite understand it, but since her older sister does school everyday (and most days are not a battle with her) she typically does one of the activities I set out for her withou

Our end goal as educators should be to create life-long learners. In order to accomplish this we must value the ability to read and write, because a persons ability to read and write define literacy. It is impossible to separate the two! As an educator I've pursued a literacy-based learning approach in all subject areas. Whether it's science, math, history, and even the arts, the possibilities are endless when reading and writing are at the core of the learning process. This

I'm going to approach this post as a Q&A session while giving the tools of my writer's (homeschool and tutoring students) favorite writing tools. These questions were asked by moms who needed help with their students writing and each of these products were successfully used to inspire early readers to write what they were learning! Should students learn to write while learning to read? Yes! Writing is proven to boost memory, therefore anyone under my tutelage must write their

When it comes to little minds we are to build a solid foundation in reading and writing. That is our primary goal. Otherwise, the sciences, history, math, and all other subject areas cannot thrive. You may be shaking your head, because you've had success with numbers but reading has been met with difficulty. Here is why I argue this case: in every subject, in every textbook there are text features and writing processes that enable a scientist (for example) to thrive as a self

What are you reading? I am thoroughly enjoying Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I knew I would learn from him, but it is above and beyond my expectations. If you want to be a writer, or if you want to teach or tutor writing (as I do) I recommend reading this book. Not only will you learn some valuable tools of the trade, but I think it'll be a book you'll enjoy as well. After reading it, I would encourage any aspiring author to pick it up and learn. The reaso

First off I want to thank you for your patience during this time of our life! We've been in flux and limbo land for the month of July, moved to Kearney the second week of August, spent a week with no WiFi (which is always a blessing in disguise, but is also super frustrating when you're attempting to run an online business) and we are back to business as usual. A better way to say that might be, we are finding our new norm. One of the areas that I'm prepping for is our homesc

I recently read an interesting study where researchers interviewed a variety of students to find out what they said about what motivates them to read. The answer to this question convicted, intrigued, and wow'ed me as a mother and a teacher: "Who gets you interested in and excited about reading?" The most common answer was mother - not teacher, father, grandparents, older siblings, peers - the answer was that their mother influenced them most! To be sure there were children w

I completely agree with the argument, just let them read what they want! However, if your reader struggles reading, guidance is definitely needed for a few reasons, but consider this one: there is a direct correlation between the reading skills and the desire to read. If you do not accomplish something well, do you want to continue doing it? I know I don't, so when I think of their struggle in that light, I am all on fire to help them find something that will spark their inte

Right now I'm preaching to the choir because we are in flux and limbo, with all of our things in boxes, living in my sisters home until my husband's last day of work and then we will move into a rental that we have not even found yet! Explaining all of that makes me feel all sorts of overwhelmed, but we are making it through the insanity that is our life right now and my children will survive without our own personal books and nooks. But I cannot stress enough the importance

There is not a one-size-fits-all program for an unmotivated reader.