September 12, 2024
One of the hardest and best parts of being a homeschool mom is that I get to make our own schedule. It’s freeing…but I’ve found open-ended can complicate things…at least for me.
Schedules don’t always go as planned, and I’m learning that’s ok. To go with the flow. Which is ironically something I’m normally good at, but I think the public school mentality has programmed me to believe that I need a rigid schedule.
Not to mention the challenge of two ADHDers.
All that is to say, September hasn’t gone as I planned it. Before we started the year, I wrote some loose weekly plans with the curriculums we’ll be using (All About Reading, RightStart Math, Curiosity Chronicles).
Then I learned my brother and girlfriend were visiting in early September, and plans would need to be tweaked. So last Friday, we headed up to San Juan Island, planning to only do math while there. (Toting all our homeschool stuff?! No thank you!)
We just got back yesterday, and though the week was a little screwed up (I had planned a Monday - Thursday schedule with Friday as a review day for all subjects), I decided to try some new things with reading brain (All About Reading).
Monday was “new phonogram” day, but I decided to try it today. And I tried some new games with some good results instead of the usual “this is boring.” So here’s what I did and what worked.
I introduced the phonogram ey that spells long a and long e. I’ve been using the Logic of English Knitting Knights songs (on youtube) to introduce our new phonograms, but while I like this apparently he does not.
To warm up, we played “swat the phonogram” with a sticky hand. I lined up 10 phonogram cards in 2 rows and gave him a sticky hand in his favorite color (yellow). I chose phonograms that were sounds that would be used in the lesson. Some had been mastered, and some were ones we still needed to review. I read the sounds, and he had to swat it with the sticky hand.
This game was well received, getting a 5 out of 5!
After reading the word “key” with our new phonogram, we played a game I learned from Developing Reader’s Academy that I’m calling “Save the Triceratops” to practice encoding (spelling) and decoding (reading). On the whiteboard, I drew a ladder, writing a second syllable with /ey/ on each rung. At the top of the ladder was a toy triceratops, and at the bottom was a superhero.
I read a word, and he had to spell the first syllable to move the superhero to the next rung to reach and save the triceratops. Then to get back down, he had to read the words back.
This game got a solid 3 out of 5…but was much more fun than our usual change the word on a magnetic whiteboard.
The last part of our lesson was syllable types, and today I tried using megablocks. I took 3 words from the lesson and wrote a syllable on each block (6 blocks total). He had to match them to build words. Then he took them apart to label syllables as bossy r (aka r-controlled vowels), vowel teams, or closed syllables. (We were only working with 3 out of the 6 syllable types.)
This also got a solid 3 out of 5.
All in all, I'm excited to try new things rather than rigidly using a curriculum and seeing what works best for us.
Which reading game are you going to try? Then let me know which works best for you.