Welcome to the Home Schooling page. I hope you find your visits in the future here of real benefit to you and your family. We want to address topics here to help you in having the best home schooling program that is possible in preparing your children as they are being prepared to be the leaders of the next century. This should be an exciting time in your life. You have been entrusted by God to prepare the next generation of leadership that He will be using to be the “light” to a very dark world. We are the “salt” of the earth and we need to be that salt that affects everything in a positive way for the times that are ahead of us.
In this session, I would like us to take a look at a very important component of our home schooling program – reading. Reading is the foundation of how well our children do in all the other basic subjects.
I want us to begin to understand reading and what reading is and what reading is not.
I want us to realize what a total reading program is for our children and to evaluate whether we are providing a total reading program for them or not. I will be making curriculum recommendations so you can have a total reading program if you do not already have one.
There are seven major components to reading. All seven are essential for teaching reading whether to a pre-school child or to a high school child. There will be a break down somewhere in your home schooling program if all these seven components are not developed and taught. The seven components are: 1) Phonics. 2) Reading Comprehension. 3) Word Comprehension. 4) Vocabulary Development. 5) Listening Skills. 6) Oral Reading. 7) Silent Reading.
The first component is phonics. Phonics is the engine to reading. You cannot have a total reading program without having phonics as part of it. Phonics teaches us how to break down the English language and decode it so we can read. There are many programs that teach phonics. We will not list them all here but will mention a few of them.
Spalding: The only 100% phonetic approach to phonics — The Writing Road to Reading — Christ Centered Approach to Phonics — A-Beka Phonics — B.J. Phonics — Alpha Phonics — MCP Phonics — Victory Drill — Explode the Code — Starting Phonetically — Starting Visually
All these programs are excellent. The real job at this point is to find the best program for your child. To do this you need to discover how your child learns. Is he/she mainly a strong oral or visual learner. That is going to make a difference in which program will be the best match for your child.
Our children all are different. They develop differently. They develop at different levels and at different speeds. We must keep all this in mind when we begin to teach phonics to our children. One of the most important things to consider at this point is when is my child ready to learn how to read. One very important developmental step is his/her ability to discriminate different sounds. Especially different sounds that are associated with the various letters of the alphabet. If this ability has not developed then we need to spend time in a readiness activity called auditory discrimination. Readiness is very important in teaching any child to read. There are numerous activities that a child should be able to perform at the readiness level before we begin to teach him formally how to read. We will cover those areas in the next article.