Search Results for: blog starting read alouds

Reading Comprehension

Can children enjoy books even before they can read? Of course they can! It’s no secret that children absolutely love books. They love being read to and love looking at the pictures even more. But what if they didn’t know how to read? What if the book you were reading did not have any pictures? Are children still interested? As parents and as teachers, we are often guilty of only reading picture books or grade-level books to our children. What we often seem to forget is that children’s comprehension level is generally much higher than their actual reading level. In … Continue reading →

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 →

Starting Read-alouds

I read to my children. I read to them a lot. Before we started homeschooling, I thought I read a lot. There were the usual bedtime stories, the books we cuddled up with on frosty, frigid mornings, and the love of library day. But after we began homeschooling, I realized how little I had actually read to my kids. Because prior to that first year, I hadn’t gotten sore throats or dry mouth from read-aloud times. When my voice got tired, I stopped. As we immersed ourselves in all things “Little House” that first year, however, we found that we … Continue reading →

Tell Me a Story! Libraries and Free Phone Stories

Karen recently wrote a great series of blogs in Homeschooling about reading aloud. Some mothers are able to read hours and hours to their children without tiring. So far, I’m not one of them. I’m trying to put Karen’s suggestions into practice and read more with my older children. It has gotten better through the years. After seven or eight readings of “Button Goes to the Park” to a four year old, my voice would be about gone. That’s how I discovered stories from the library. A lot of libraries offer them. The kids are so excited to get to … 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 →