As a home educator, I feel like I’m constantly revising my game plan.  The overall plan and goals stay the same, but the course of travel seems to be constantly changing.  My latest challenges have been reading and writing.  My boys do not enjoy reading right now and Jesse (my six year old) takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to write anything!  This is very frustrating to me because I LOVE to read and write in my spare time.

SOooo, for reading right now, we open to the book of Psalms and the boys each read 15-20 minutes with me.  Later in the day I allow them to choose for themselves what they’d like to read for pleasure/practice.  This helps them with their reading and we’re getting extra time in God’s word as well.  It’s amazing to me how fast they pick up on words like “righteousness” and no longer need help when they come to those familiar words.

For the writing aspect, I decided to let them write creatively for one week.  Everyday this week I’m giving them a list of words to use and they have the freedom to create a story in twenty minutes.  Today’s words were:  chicken, farm, eggs, coop, and garden.  I told them to simply guess at the spelling of words they were unfamiliar with and we would correct themlater.  They did fantastic!  They loved the freedom of writing creatively and both of them were able to complete the task in twenty minutes.  Jesse wrote more in those twenty minutes than he ever does with Bible verses in the same amount of time.  We won’t do this regularly because I don’t want to reinforce incorrect spelling, but if it helps Jesse refine his fine motor skills and handwriting technique, it’s worth it.

~audrey

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.