A Month of Literacy Activities

A little bit everyday goes a long way! Check out this link for a calendar full of literacy activities to do with your child everyday. Our Lesson Ideas are perfect for the activities they suggest because they’re quick, fun, and easy to do! A new month is just around the corner so it’s a perfect time to give this a try!

9 Tips For Advanced Readers

Our main goal here at Reading Coach is to give parents the knowledge to teach their children how to read - whether your child is homeschooled, goes to public school, or private. Since we are a relatively new site, we still have loads of content that has yet to be added. Most of what we have up now is geared towards helping your child learn to read. However, in the coming months I hope to add more to our site that helps children read to learn. This will be for kids that have a solid foundation of the basic reading skills in place and as a result, read pretty well. All they need now is to improve upon those skills so they can go beyond “simple reading” to understanding and learning about the things that interest them and about the world around them. Therefore, the focus will be on continuing to expand vocabulary, improve and/or build comprehension, and challenge their thinking in fun and engaging ways. So stay tuned for future additions to these sections!

In the meantime, one of our readers asked for advice on what to do with his daughter (a first grader) that reads above grade level at school. He’d like some tips for things they can do at home with her to challenge her a bit and keep her love of reading alive. So here are some tips for all of you out there that would like to do the same for your advanced readers:

• Have Higher Level Books Available:This one may seem like a no-brainer…and it is. But I’d like to highlight the importance of just making the books available for your child to read, not necessarily asking or requiring your child to read them. It’s amazing to see the choices your child will make on their own when they have the freedom to choose above (and sometimes below) their level. So stock up your shelves with a variety of selections and provide the opportunity for them to explore and choose.
• Go Beyond The Classroom: Get involved in what your child is reading at school by asking your child’s teacher about the themes and stories they are reading in class. You can then take that information to the library (or even online) to get books and stories that are related to what they are learning, but provide more of a challenge for your child. Do this only if your child shows interest in the topic - pushing your child to learn more about something they don’t care about won’t help!
• Do Extention Activities: Start a project at home to extend what they’re learning in school. Is your child learning about plants? Have them read about growing a garden and then get started on one as a family project! Is she learning about the solar system? Have her read about the stories behind the constellations and how they got their names. Then maybe she can check out the night sky to create her own constellation and a story to go along with it. Or maybe your child can create an alternate ending to a book or story they’re reading in class. Get creative!
• Read Aloud To Them: I’m sure you already do this…but try to focus on reading books that are really advanced for your child. Advanced readers sometimes hesitate to read tougher books by themselves (especially if they are younger), but they thrive on listening to books with advanced vocabulary. Chapter books are great for this! These books will serve to challenge your child by exposing them to words, ideas, and plots that are more complex. This will also really help their writing too!
• Do Paired Reading with Chapter Books: If your child shows interest in harder chapter books but isn’t quite ready to read them on their own, you can do partner readings with your child. A great way to do this is to start reading the book to your child and then have them slowly start taking turns with you. They can take a turn reading a paragraph or a page to you, then maybe a couple of pages, a chapter, and so on. Pretty soon, they’ll want to read them on their own!
• Discuss What They Read: Asking questions to check for comprehension is fine, but what I’m talking about here is having a full blown discussion about what your child is reading. Go beyond the simple who, what, where, when, why detail type questions and move to discussion-starting questions and comments like: “I wonder how Mary felt when Christie said that?”, “What do you think about how he solved that problem - How would you have handled that situation?”, “Why do you think the author ended the book this way?”, “Does that remind you of something/someone in your life?”, “Is this like any other book/story you’ve read - How is it different/alike?”, etc. Details can be important, but you want to teach your child to go beyond them to actually THINK about what they read.
• Pair Fiction With Nonfiction: Doing this not only helps to broaden your child’s understanding of things, but it also helps to give them a depth of knowledge in the topic. For example, have your child read Verdi (fiction) and then read Slinky, Scaly, Slithery Snakes (non-fiction) to get a better understanding about snakes.
  
• Get Them A Magazine Subscription: Kids love to get mail with their names on it! There are tons of educational magazines out there to choose from (you can even pick different grade levels) . Let your child help you pick one out that would interest them.
• Focus on Quality not Quantity: Schools often reward kids for the number of books read or for completing a certain list. Although that’s completely okay, you can take the opportunity to teach your child the value of reading a good book for the pleasure of it and for what they’ll learn from it rather than “to read as much as possible”. You can focus on some classics or share some books that you really enjoyed as a kid.

There are many things you can do to challenge your kids at home. Just remember to keep it fun and to use their interests to lead the way! We’d love to have other parents share what works for them! What are some things you do to help challenge your child at home?

Read Between The Lions

I love this show! Even though PBS’s Read Between The Lions has been around for seven seasons, I always like to refer parents to it just in case they don’t know it exists. It’s a show that can do a lot to add to your child’s reading skills. Here are some of the things you’ll see on the show:

• Books and stories are read aloud (book characters even come to life!)
• New vocabulary is introduced in context
• Words, syllables, and letters are highlighted as they’re spoken (this really helps fluency and word recognition!)
• Silly songs and rhymes that promote reading in a fun way

Check out this video to get a peek at what it’s like:

You can also visit the PBS Lions’ page for cool games, stories, and videos that extend the activities you see on the show. It’s a really useful site that compliments a great show!

Literacy Lowdown - 8/24

We’ve had a great week here at Reading Coach…we’ve nearly doubled our readers! We’re getting a lot of great emails and comments from you guys - sharing your stories and asking some really good questions (I’ll soon turn some of those into a post). People are passing us around and we’re getting in contact with some really cool families. So a big thanks to all of you out there that support us!

With that in mind…there’s still one more week left till we giveaway the gift card to Abunga.com. So feel free to share us with your friends who might want a chance to win too!

In other news…here are some great links for you to check out to see what others are doing this week. Happy reading!

Dr. Mommy shares her tips for motivating your teen to read. Very useful!

The Little Blue School is organizing an awesome literary event/contest for homeschoolers of varying ages. It sounds like something really cool to get into if your kids enjoy writing. Check out her post about their Book Arts Bash for more details! She also shares a pretty creative Unit Study on elections (called Vote For Me!) that’d be perfect to do this year.

This Homeschool Mom generously shares her novel guides with you so that you can have your kids do some creative things with the novels they read. Many of her activities help children deepen their comprehension of a book (and vocabulary words) in a fun way!

Catherine shares her experiences with teaching reading to her preschool daughter. It’s always nice to see when kids can have a hand in leading their own learning…even at a very young age!

Okay, so I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of kids watching tons of T.V. - but a show that’s created for the purpose of expanding children’s vocabularies gets a big thumbs up! Read more about this new show and how it can help your early reader at Fun With Vocabulary.

Get Into The Game!

We’ve received a couple of emails from people who are interested in starting up their own blogs to write about their kids’ progress and don’t know where to get started. It’s pretty easy actually. Just head over to WordPress and register. It’s ABSOLUTELY FREE and very easy to use. You’ll be writing your first post within a few minutes. Blogger is another free option, but we’re partial to WordPress around here. By the way, both of these options also allow you the option of keeping the entire blog private if that’s a concern.

If you want to get really fancy you can buy your own domain name and host your own site. It’s a little more work, but you have a little more control (and responsibility) over how your site works that way.

Why should you start an education or family blog? Here are a few good reasons:

• Track your kids’ progress–It’s a great way to keep notes on their struggles and achievements
• Meet and connect with others–If you’re homeschooling, there are many others with whom you can network and share ideas. The same goes for teachers and parents who are working with their kids outside of school.
• A blog for your kids–having your kids keep a blog of their own is great writing exercise for them and also is a great way to help them (and you) get hands on experience with how technology is changing the way we learn.  Maybe they could use their blog to write reviews for the books they read.
• A teaching tool–What if you posted assignments for you children on your blog and they were tasked with reading and comprehending these assignments? You could even include some intentional grammar and spelling errors and have your child find them.

There are probably a million other reasons for you to start blogging that have nothing to do with education, but hopefully this will convince you give it a try. Make sure you let us know about your new blog (a link would be great), and we’ll make sure to put you on our blogroll and feature your unique ideas!

Stump the Teacher

Can You Stump This Teacher?

I made this game up when I was a teacher in the hopes of creating an interest for independent reading in my kids and also for improving their comprehension skills during independent reading. I introduced it as a contest because, if I’m honest, I knew that was the only way I was going to get their attention and initial interest. And no, I did’t feel the least bit guilty for tricking kids to read - especially when I knew that it could result in a new found love of reading!

A local organization donated a whole class set of a certain book that I thought the whole class could read on their own or at home with their parents. This was the first of many books I used to play Stump the Teacher. Here’s how I introduced the game:

• I bragged to them that I was SO smart I could read a book, understand it, and be able to answer ANY question they could throw at me. Of course they didn’t believe me, so I had to challenge them by creating a contest to see if anyone could come up with a question that I couldn’t answer…therefore stumping the teacher.
• I explained to the kids that I would assign a certain number of chapters each week and that every Friday they would get the chance to ask me any questions they wanted to see if they could try to stump me. It’s amazing how interested kids get when they think they might have the opportunity to prove you wrong. What an incentive!
• I created a “Stump the Teacher” question box out of an old tissue box wrapped with construction paper where I had written plenty of goading comments like ” I bet you can’t stump me!” and “You better think of a really difficult question!”. I left cut up strips of paper next to the box so students could write their questions and drop them in throughout the week as they thought of them.
• I encouraged my students to work together and/or get their parents to help them come up with really challenging questions. I was hoping that parents would get involved and actually read the book with their kids and discuss it so that they could come up with questions together. The idea worked with some but not all. Oh well, I tried!
• Then every Friday they would gather around me on the floor as I picked questions out of the box to read and answer aloud. They’d laugh and squeal as I rolled my eyes, yawned, or feigned disinterest as I effortlessly answered their easy detail oriented questions (who, what, where, when type questions).

This is where the game became interesting. After making comments about how easy their questions were, some kids figured out that they would really have to dig and think about better questions to ask me. One week, I had a student ask me a really insightful question about one of the characters. I made a huge deal about what a great question that was and how he almost stumped me. Sure enough, other kids started asking similar questions and it soon became a competition to see who could ask the best question. It didn’t take long for these kids to dive in and use their critical thinking skills to really analyze what was going on in the story and with the characters in order to come up with questions to try to stump me. I was really impressed by their creativity! I, of course, gave in a couple of times to the really good questions and let some kids stump me as an incentive to continue their awesome brainstorming. Warning: Be prepared for the relentless gloating!

I realize that this game is best used in a classroom setting where you can use that competition to your advantage, yet it can still be a powerful way to get your kids to improve their comprehension of a selection at home. You’d just have to tweak it a bit and make it more of a game between you and your child and/or siblings. It would be a great game to use in a reading/literature class in a homeschooling co-op! Although competition is good in this game, the real reason it works is because of the continual discussion of the book. So let the discussions and your child’s questions be your guide throughout the book…it can be so much fun!

Do any of you have any tips or games you play with your kids to get them to understand books or stories better? We’d love to hear from you and have you share so we can all learn!

Literacy Lowdown - 8/17

Check out this week’s reading roundup for some cool posts from other homeschoolers…happy reading!

Dawn at Day by Day Discoveries has discovered that reading is the key to her daughter’s success with math problems - and that they’re actually fun now!

Yielded Heart shares her tools for organizing her homeschool…she really likes making reading logs for her kids.

No Time For Flashcards shares a fun Summer Olympics activity for you to do with your child that includes a book that ties in with the activity. Check out her site for tons of ideas for other crafts that go along with books!

Topsy-Techie, who’s working on “raising homegrown geeks”, shares her reviews for online/computer programs geared towards helping kids who have learning disabilities with reading and other subjects. There are some really cool programs on there that can be used by anyone - but is especially helpful to those who need some help with special education for homeschoolers.

While on the topic of online games and such, Vocabulary Can Be Fun reminds their readers of the Fun With Vocabulary Games that they have on their site. They have some great resources on there to help your child build their vocabulary!

Free Books!

That’s what we got today…a lot of free books. Our local used book store, Mckay’s, had three huge bins of free books sitting outside of their doors. So before we even entered the store, we had about 30 books in our arms ready to take to the car. Sure we had to dig to find some good stuff, but there was plenty hidden in there to find! We came away with a decent collection of fiction and nonfiction books that cover different genres…for all ages. I even found a copy of one of my favorite books ever, A Wrinkle In Time! Check out some of the titles we picked up.

Click on picture to get a closer view of the titles

If you’re lucky to have such a resource in your town, you should definitely take full advantage of it because you can never have too many books. After all, according to Russ Pulliam, having books around the house creates readers for life.

So get out there and stock up your shelves…hopefully for free!

You Still Have Time…

To win a $20 gift card to Abunga.com for this month’s Back To School or Home School Giveaway. We’ll be drawing a random name from our email subscribers on September 1st, so go ahead and subscribe today!

The Latin Baby Book Club Is Here!

Thanks to The Hen over at Bilingual in the Boonies for the heads up on the launching of the new site Latin Baby Book Club.

I’m really excited about this new resource because it allows parents to find new books and music in Spanish for their kids. This site will serve as a great place to learn about latin children’s literature and culture for anyone interested in sharing a new language with their kids. As a bilingual homeschooling mom that’s trying to raise a bilingual family, I can’t begin tell you how helpful this will be! Okay, maybe I’ll try.

I’m always looking for new Spanish books and songs to read and sing with Chick Pea, but I’m so limited on local selection that I have to focus most of my efforts online. Then there’s the problem of time…I just don’t have enough of it to sift through countless sites to find quality bilingual literature and information to use at home. Enter The Latin Baby Book Club!

These wonderful ladies do all of the work for me! They feature great book reviews, author interviews, songs, tips for early readers, bilingual mom tales, and more. Be sure to check them out!