Read-alouds: The best and biggest benefit

In two previous posts, I extolled the benefits of reading aloud to my children. Clearly, we are book lovers, and we’ve seen many benefits of read-alouds from the time our children were very young, from instilling a love of language to increasing the kids’ confidence in their own ability to read aloud. But, as my girls have gotten older, I’ve seen another benefit of read-alouds, which adds a whole new dimension to our homeschooling and to our lives. Reading a great deal of literature to my children leads to the most amazing and delightful discussions. Rather than sending them off … Continue reading

More Benefits of Frequent Read-alouds

In my last post, I talked about the early days in our homeschool, and of slowly building up to longer and more frequent read-aloud times, which have been the source of much fun and learning. In this post, blogger Teresa McEntire offers some great tips for growing in confidence with read-alouds, and this forum thread affirms the wisdom of using read-alouds to help nudge a budding reader along in the learning process. Books have been part of our family life since before we had a family. My husband and I were both English majors who came into the marriage with … Continue reading

Homeschooling Week in Review January 22- January 28, 2007

It has been a busy house here are the homeschool blog at families.com. Here is what we have been up to: Monday January 22, 2007 We started the week talking about homeschooling for others and hiring homeschoolers with I Want to Homeschool Your Child, I Want You to Homeschool My Child, and Homeschool Tutors must Manage Expectations, by yours truly (Andrea Hermitt). Karen Edmisten wrote Read-alouds: The best and biggest benefit, which speaks to the benefits of reading aloud to children. This article was part of a series on read-alouds started the previous week. Learning with Food Network by Karen … Continue reading

The Sunday Evening Review: January 21, 2007

We saw many changes in the homeschool blog this week. We said see ya’ round to Valorie, who is writing for another families.com blog, and hello to a brand new blogger, Karen. Keep an eye out for guest blogs from Valorie. We also spent some time visiting with bloggers from other categories. Our blogs meandered through different topics and issues in the homeschooling world, but for the most part, one good blog led to another. We started the week with a guest blog by Julie Gentry entitled Trusting Your Instincts: Know When to Say No in which Julie discussed how … Continue reading