Fabulous Reading Resource

A few weeks ago, I read a review of Reading Eggs on Mary's Homegrown Learners blog.  I was very intrigued by Mary's review and decided to sign us up for a free preview.  I have to say I am VERY impressed with this website.  I ended up purchasing a subscription so I can use it with both of my boys.  There are two main levels:  Reading Eggs for children from the pre-reading stage until about 2nd grade and Reading Eggspress for children from about 2nd grade through 6th grade.

What I like about this as a mom is that I find the activities to be challenging for all age levels.  I feel that each lesson includes many important components of reading instruction including phonics, sight words, vocabulary, and comprehension.  There is a placement test that your child can take to help you decide where they should start.  I felt that my youngest son tested a little low (i.e. the level they placed him in seemed too easy), so I emailed their help desk.  They replied very quickly and explained how I could go about moving him up.  Great customer service!!  I am also REALLY impressed with the difficulty level of the activities for my oldest son.  He reads well above his grade level; however, I sat with him as he did one of his first quizzes and could not believe the critical thinking skills he had to apply in order to answer correctly.

What my sons like about this program is that they receive "golden eggs" for completing their lessons.  These eggs can then be used like money to purchase items for their own little avatars.  They can customize the avatars and each avatar has its own house.  My youngest son (and actually my oldest son too) loves to buy new items for his "guy's" house.  He is actually learning a lot about budgeting because he has to decide if he has enough eggs and whether he should save or spend.  He has been know to do several lessons within as single day in order to accumulate more eggs to spend!!  I feel okay about it because I know he is learning a lot from the lessons.

In all, I highly recommend this program.  My sons are doing lessons from Reading Eggs/Reading Eggspress several times per week as part of their homeschool reading instruction.  Even if you don't homeschool, this would be a really great program to have your child use over the summer so they don't lose their skills.  They will have so much fun they won't even know they're learning.

Great Graphic Organizers

On Monday of this week I stumbled across a great website with lots of free printable graphic organizers.  I am finding that I like using these a lot with my oldest son as we work on reading comprehension.  When I found this website, I was doing a Google search to find a printable story map with the major literary elements. In addition to finding the story map I wanted, I found a wealth of other resources.  I'll share a few of my favorites now, but I encourage you to visit the site to see what other goodies you can use.  HERE IS THE LINK to the website itself.

Here are a few of the things I printed immediately.  My excitement over this find greatly increase my son's writing workload on Monday, but (bless his heart!) he didn't complain a bit!!

Since the boys and I had gone to the play "Ferdinand the Bull" last week at a local children's theater, I had him fill out this "Play Response" form.  I was planning to have him write about it anyway, but having this great form to write on was better than the blank notebook paper I was planning to have him use.  (NOTE:  All the forms shown here were completed by my fourth grader, not my first grader!)

I thought he did a great job on this.  He really took it seriously and I love the illustration he added in lieu of an actual photo from the play. 

The play was VERY different from the book and I'm sure I could find a great compare/contrast organizer on the website, but for now I'm really happy with how well he summarized the main details of the play.  I also liked that there is a place to circle his "rating" of the play at the bottom.  We are going on a field trip this Friday and I've already downloaded and printed a Field Trip Response form for him to complete next Monday.

I also found this Reading Log form that I like a whole lot.  As you may remember, in addition to reading a piece of literature together (where we work on vocabulary, comprehension, literary elements, etc.), I'm having my fourth grader read an additional book (his choice) for 30 minutes each day just for fun.  I'm not quizzing him on it or having him write about it or anything like that.  The focus is just on reading for readings' sake.  I'm so proud of him for reading three lengthy chapter books so far this year (and he's almost done with the fourth!).  I have been having him just keep a log of the titles of the books, which I'll continue to do so we can keep track of what he's read.  However, after finding this form, I've decided that from this point on I'll have him complete the form when he finishes each "just for fun" book.  It's a quick form to complete and it allows him to categorize the book by genre, rate it, and write a brief summary.  Below is his form for Because of Winn-Dixie, which he just finished last week.

The next photos show some bookmark printables that I found and loved!  I haven't used these yet, but they are just what I needed although I didn't realize it until I saw them!  When we were still doing A World of Adventure, my son and I had talked about the different types of conflict in literature.  Even though we've put AWOA aside for now, I still wanted to continue to help him analyze conflict in future texts that we read.  So.....I'm loving these bookmarks.  I made several copies of the page you see below.  My plan is to cut them out and have them available so he can easily grab them to mark places in the story where he has identified a particular type of conflict.  When finished with a book, the bookmarks used can be stapled together in a group as documentation of our learning and thinking about that particular book.

In our AWOA curriculum, we also talked about the development of plot.  Needless to say, I was thrilled to find a set of "plot" bookmarks.  Again, I've printed up a bunch of these and I'll let him use these to mark where he finds the various stages of plot development in a story.  I'm sure that initially he'll need a lot of assistance from me in how to use these tools, but I am hoping that over time he'll be able to use them himself. 

These examples are only a few of the treasure trove of resources available at Cheryl Sigmon's website.  Be sure to visit and check it out!!

I. Love. It.

My intention is to write on this blog more regularly than once a week, but, boy!, homeschooling sure is keeping me busy!  On top of homeschooling my 2 boys, this week I added teaching 8 piano lessons and 3 Kindermusik classes.  Perhaps that explains why I've been absent in this space!  Also, when we get going with our school days I find that I forget to take many pictures.  I'll try to be better about that!

Here's what I love about homeschooling so far:

I love not having to rush myself and the boys out the door each morning.  We are easing into our school day gradually, trying to start around 9:00 every morning.  This allows me time to exercise before school as well as time to check email, clean up after breakfast, throw in a load of laundry, and gather any last minute things I need for our day.

I love starting each school day cuddled on the couch with my two favorite guys in the whole world.  We have been reading a short devotion from the book Jesus Calling each morning.  It starts our time together on a positive note, which I feel is very important.

I love that I've had time to make homemade bread for us to enjoy twice this week so far.  It disappears quickly! Is there anything better than homemade bread fresh from the oven?

 I love being able to incorporate my boys' interests into their school day.  One way I've done this with my little guy is to have him create a scene with his Legos.  I then took photos of several "action" shots as he manipulated the scene to tell a story.  I printed each photo on printer paper and each day he's been writing the words to go with one page.  When he's finished, he'll have his own book!  This is a much more motivating way for me to get him to write than anything else I've come up with!

I love having the flexibility to add in little field trips that support our learning.  Yesterday I took the boys apple picking at an orchard since we read How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World this week for FIAR.  I'll post more about that later.

So.......I'm loving it.  

A few of you asked about why I'm not incorporating a lot of Montessori materials into our homeschooling.  Which is a fair question since many of you followed me for that last several years over at My Montessori Journey.  I've been thinking about how to answer that question and will try to do a post about that soon.  I just wanted to pop in here today so you'd know I was still around.  :-)

Pinterest Love!!

I'm sure many of you have already jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon, but if you haven't, you MUST check it out!!  If you don't know what I'm talking about, Pinterest is a (free!) online organizational tool which allows you to virtually "pin" ideas that you find online onto virtual "pinboards" that you create.  I have been an avid blog reader and follower for several years.  I prefer to read my blogs in Google Reader.  I like having one place to go to check out who's posted something new.  However, I have been less than happy with the limitations of GR for keeping track of posts I want to refer back to.  GR allows you to "star" items you like, but then you just get a super-long list of starred items arranged chronologically and it is somewhat difficult to go back and find what you're looking for when you have to search through a really long text-based list of starred items.  With Pinterest, you can quickly and easily pin a visual image and Pinterest saves the link, so all you have to do when you want to refer to the idea is click on the image you "pinned" and it takes you directly to the link.  The possibilities are endless for how you can arrange and organize your pins.  If you  are interested in checking out my pinboards, CLICK HERE.  It is so fun!!  You do need an invitation to get started, so if you need me to invite you, please leave a comment with your email address and I'll send you an invitation.  I hope you love it as much as I do!! 

Oh........one more thing...........some of you may be interested to know that I have resisted getting on Facebook for many years now.  Let it be a testimony to how much I wanted to be on Pinterest that I FINALLY opened a Facebook account.  Apparently you can't get on Pinterest without a Facebook or Twitter account.  I even emailed Pinterest to ask how to access it without FB and they didn't even reply!  I still love them though!  I feel kinda sorry for all the people who know me in real life and have friended me on FB because I really just joined for Pinterest and I'm not planning to put any information on my profile other than my name.  I know, pretty boring!  Truthfully, I prefer blogging to FB now that I can honestly compare the two.  You can write so much more on a blog!  I guess I'm just a wordy kind of girl.  :-)  Plus I don't think anyone wants to read about me doing laundry or wiping dried poop off a chicken's bottom (which I really had to do tonight).  See.........no one wants to know that.   That's why I would be really bad at posting on FB.  OK.........wordy girl signing off now.........G'night!