alphabet doodles

Kindergarten is coming in September and we are leaning towards the road of homeschooling. With this comes some nervousness and excitement, but I am glad to have a friend who is hooked up with a pretty good charter school system that we might try out too! The girls have never gone to official preschool, but we do preschool activities at home, so I figure that is enough (at least I hope!).

I must admit Kindergarten is not my ideal grade to teach, during my short stint teaching, I taught fourth and that was my dream grade. They, well most of them, came to me already reading, so I am not too familiar with teaching the basics and nitty and gritty of reading. I have been going back and forth with my BFF via email, she has taught kinder, and she has been giving a plethora of tips and direction on things to do (thanks Lin!).

We do a lot of doodling in the house, but now every afternoon we are gonna give it some direction. We will pick a letter and just start doodling things that start with that letter. I am sure this little activity will evolve as we go, but I hope it will keep learning the alphabet and sounds a lot more interesting and fun!

{click on images to enlarge}

We each had our own sketchbooks (I gave her mine since she likes to steal it so often and I got myself a brand new one from my stash), then we just started drawing. Actually, she wanted to draw a bird so we started drawing a tree first. I drew my tree and she would draw her own version. I drew my branches, them she would draw her own, thus I think you get the idea of how this little session went. We started brainstorming things that started with a B and we came up with: bird, branches, butterfly, bear, bow tie, ball, bag, and Brave. After we drew, she wrote all the words on the left as she copied what I wrote on my left. Little kid writing is so cute!

It was really fun for her and kept her engaged, which is a good thing! I think you are going to start hearing more about learning activities for little ones on this blog because we are switching to school mode so very soon!

Linda also suggested Zoo Phonics as a good program to teach reading and Star Fall as a good site to teach kids letters and sound. I remember Star Fall well because I used it in my classroom and I remember lots of good things from it. Anyone have any other sites or programs to recommend and make this task of teaching reading not seem so daunting?

I loved all your recommendations regarding reading chapter books to the girls at this age. I picked Pippi Longstocking to start with because they have seen the movie so they are somewhat familiar with the storyline. I figure they are a bit young to stay engaged the whole time, but hopefully knowing the plot will help them while listening. I think after we are done with Pippi, I may try some of the chapter books that have a different story every chapter and see how that goes! The wonderful thing about reading, is you can experiment with different stories until you find the right one to keep their attention! Thank God for variety, right?

Do share tips and stories of what you do to teach little children to read. I am all ears to learning how to make this task seem not so scary. I am already gonna say, "Thanks!" because I know you all are going to give such good advice!