Teaching Ella to Read

I should have written this post several months ago, but life got busy (doesn't it always?), and I never wrote it. So, here it is now . . .only a few months late.

When Ella was around 4 1/2 years old, I ventured into the task of teaching her to read. Though I'd never taught anyone to read, I really thought she was showing lots of signs of readiness, so I decided that we would begin the journey. I entered into the task with caution: if, for some reason, she wasn't ready I wasn't going to push it. She was still young when I began the process, and I didn't want to deter her from reading or learning in any way by pushing her if she wasn't ready.

I chose to use the book Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons as our curriculum (I've included a brief review at the end of this post). I made Ella a sticker chart to show her progress and help motivate her along the way. The first few lessons went well with Ella. Then, slowly, things started to get really frustrating. We were struggling through the lessons, and I was getting more and more frustrated. I really thought she could do the lessons (which only frustrated me more!), but just wasn't putting forth the right kind of effort to complete the lessons. So, around lesson 20 or so, we stopped. I decided to take a step back and reevaluate in a few months.

I'm SO glad we took a step back, and started again a few months later. Our lessons were like night and day compared to a few months earlier. She breezed through most lessons, and continued to be eager to learn more. That's not to say that there weren't times when we had tough lessons, but overall, our lesson time was much, much better. 

What was the difference in the few months time? Was Ella not really ready? When I reflect back to the first time that we tried to work on the lessons, I think the struggles with the lessons had a lot more to do with me than with Ella. It was my first time attempting anything like this, and I'm not sure that I had the right approach and attitude with Ella. I think she easily picked up on my frustration and that manifested in how she completed the lessons. When we started the second time, I started with a fresh attitude and more determined patience. I think my demeanor with her made a huge difference in the lessons.

And now, Ella can read! She finished the 100th lesson not long after she turned five years old. I was very pleased with how well she was reading when she completed all 100 lessons, and her reading has continued to progress even though the official lessons have stopped. I think the curriculum did a good job giving her the tools she needs to continue to grow in her reading ability.  

Here are my general thoughts about the curriculum Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. I should note that I haven't looked at any other curriculums or programs for teaching reading, so I do not have anything to compare the program to. 

Pros:

• The book is inexpensive, and does not require any additional materials except some paper to do the sound writing portion.
• The book was very easy for me to use to teach her. Everything was laid out - even down to the words I should say during each lesson.
• The lessons were short. The book states that each lesson should only take about 15-20 minutes. There were many times Ella finished a lesson in about 10 minutes, but there were also some lessons that took her longer than 20 minutes. On average, most lessons did take about 15 minutes.
• The lessons are also short enough that you can do more than one lesson a day, depending on your child. With Ella there were times she was especially eager to keep on, and it was nice to be able to move on to the next lesson.
• It was also nice to know that if Ella was struggling with something, the lesson was short, and we didn't have to labor on for a long period of time.
• The book incorporated pictures, questions for checking for comprehension, as well as writing as part of learning to read.
• We frequently skipped the writing portion of the lessons. I think the writing portion is beneficial, but for Ella is wasn't always necessary.
• I wasn't sure how to classify this, but I really liked the way the book teaches the student to sound the words out.

Cons:

• The lessons, particularly the first 25 or so, can be tedious until your child "gets" the method.
• The names of the letters of the alphabet are not introduced until the very end of the book (letters are simply referred to using the sound they make). There is reasoning behind not using the letter names (and I understand that), but Ella already knew her letters prior to starting the curriculum, so we skipped parts of lessons at the end.

Overall, I really liked this curriculum, and plan to use it for Troy. I do think it will be interesting to see how Troy takes to the approach compared to Ella, because I think Ella's personality fit the curriculum well and Troy and Ella are quite different. : ) 

Clothespin Color Letter Matching

Inspired by a blog I found through Pinterest, I created this clothespin letter matching game with colors. I thought it would be a good opportunity to for Ella to not only practice her letters, but also learn to recognize the words for several colors. I mounted the cards on index cards (simply because it was something sturdy I had hanging around), and laminated them for extra durability. Poor Ella, though, because I didn’t do the best job clearly writing the letters on the clothespins (it was harder to write the letters than I thought it would be!). I’m going to have to go back through a few of the clothespins and fix my poor handwriting!

 

 

Tot School

-Ella is 26 months old-

It has been awhile since I have written a tot school post. We’re still doing things (although I haven’t been quite as diligent as I would like to be), but I have done a poor job documenting it here on the blog.  This week’s post is going to be abbreviated – but I wanted to show how just one set of things (in this case, little colored animals) can be used for a variety of activities.

Ella has been obsessed with these little animals for a week now. She can spend hours everyday playing and learning with them. (Anyone else’s toddler like that? Do they get obsessed with one thing and not get bored with it?) Here are just a few things Ella has been doing with the animals:

• Counting the animals (generally)
• Counting specific ones (for instance, ask her to count only the ducks or only the blue ones)
• Sorting the animals.
• Identifying the animals by name (duck, cow, pig, sheep).
• Identifying the colors of the animals.
• Selecting specific animals out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a pig)
• Selecting a specific color out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a blue one)
• Selecting something even more specific out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a blue duck)
• Comparing the sizes of the animals (ask her which horse is bigger (there are different sizes in the bunch)).
• Moving the animals around (for instance, from her bucket to her purse to the table).

 

Tot School

-Ella is 24 months old-

Last week we worked on the letter “D” using several printables from the COAH blog. Ella can now identify A, B, C, D, E, and sometimes L. She’s picking up letters quickly now. We’re still only working on one letter each week, but she’s learning to recognize the letters a lot more quickly than in the past.

In conjunction with the letter D, she had her first exposure to a lacing activity using the dinosaur from COAH. She didn’t get it at first – in fact she just ripped the dino’s head off even though I had laminated it – but by the second day I let her play with it, she was actually practicing lacing!

Ella has also been doing really well with counting to ten, although at times she forgets eight. We practiced counting using the Ten Tiny Puppies book.

Ella has been thoroughly enjoying playing with her shape sorter. It has a bunch of shapes and is a good challenge for her. Sometimes she enjoys just dumping them all out and putting them back in (with the lid open), but that works great too!

Trying to Do Better Everyday

I guess now isn’t the appropriate time to write a New Year’s Resolution post, considering we’re a week into February, but I guess the thoughts behind this post really are a resolution of sorts.

For a long time, I’ve made major goals that require serious lifestyle changes all at once. I’ve finally recognized that I don’t ever achieve those goals because they require too much change at one time.  I’ve come to realize that I need to take little baby steps everyday in progression to an ultimate goal. I’m thankful to the Flylady and her methods for pointing this out to me within the realm of taking care of my home. I still have a long way to go when it comes to taking care of my home, but I have come such a long way – by taking baby steps rather than a giant leap. Sure, I could spend a weekend crash cleaning my home, but without putting good habits into place, I’ll need to do that cleaning again because it will just go back to the way it was before.

There are lots of areas I want to improve upon in my life and one of the main purposes behind starting this blog was to keep myself accountable and to push myself in those areas. Along the way I’ve learned that my focus should be to do a little better than the day before, and I’ll be making good progress whether that be in keeping my house in order or eating healthier or going to bed earlier or doing a better job budgeting or having more patience with my kids or having a stronger prayer life. By doing a little better everyday, I’ll be hopefully changing my life in such a way as to embed good new habits that lead to the major lifestyle changes I really want to make.

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On a completely unrelated note, my photo of Ella that won first place in the Paper Mama’s Photo Challenge is in a vote-off for the best photo of the month. I’d love a vote if you like my photo! :)

Tot School

~Ella is 24 months old~

We’ve been really out of our regular Tot School routine. We’ve had a sick household off and on for about two weeks, but with that said, we have done a few things.

For Christmas Ella got a ton of Melissa and Doug toys. I love these toys, and so does Ella. They are great for learning, and Ella really enjoys playing with them.

Ella has loved building towers with these blocks. I’m absolutely amazed at how good she has gotten at building the towers. She also puts the boxes all back together. I thoroughly enjoy watching her mind work through the process of figuring out which order the boxes must be put back together.

Ella is beyond obsessed with coloring lately. Although it is still a bit advanced for her, I printed out tracing sheets from COAH. Ella has started drawing lines and circles on her own, so I thought I’d go ahead and introduce the tracing sheets.

Ella played with alphabet fridge magnets I got from Target for $1.00. She loves playing with them on the cookie sheet. Although she can’t recognized many letters yet, she loves finding the ones she knows. She’ll ask “What’s that?” when she comes to a letter she doesn’t recognize.

Ella has also been playing with puzzles a lot, like this Melissa and Doug animal sound puzzle. She’s so quick with the puzzles now, but she still loves to do them!

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On a completely unrelated note, my photo of Ella that won first place in the Paper Mama’s Photo Challenge is in a vote-off for the best photo of the month. I’d love a vote if you like my photo! :)

Tot School: Week 8

-Ella is currently 22 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

We took the week of Thanksgiving off from Tot School (we didn't do anything official), but we got back into our activities this past week.

• Letter B: We started working on learning the letter B this week (Ella can now easily recognize the letter A everywhere!). We focused on "B is for Butterfly" and Ella really enjoyed coloring butterfly pictures. There are a ton of great ideas for the letter B on the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. Many of her activities are still to advanced for Ella, but we were able to use a few of them, and I look forward to using more as Ella continues to learn.

• Christmas/Winter Activities: This is Ella's second Christmas, but it is the first one that she is really old enough to learn about some Christmas/Winter things. We've been learning about snowmen and Christmas trees. Ella has been coloring Christmas trees and snowmen all  week long. I found a bunch of coloring sheets from the Crayola website. 

• Shapes: Ella has been doing great with her shapes! She thoroughly enjoys doing her shapes puzzle I made from the COAH blog.

• Life skills: We decided to give Ella a Christmas present early so that she could have some practice with opening Christmas presents and learning how to act during present-opening. The Christmas present we gave Ella was a Melissa and Doug latches board. This "puzzle" has different types of locks/latches on doors that open up to reveal different animals.

Waiting for dad to open it up!

Cheesy posing with her present picture:

Tot School: Week 7

-Ella is currently 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

Do you ever have one of those weeks where you look back and it went by so quickly you don't even feel like the week existed? I had one of those weeks last week. Needless to say, Tot School activities were a bit slacking in our house last week, but that's ok - it is part of life! And, unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures this week either. :(

We did a lot of work on continuing to recognize the letter "A" this week. Ella consistently identifies the letter "A" now and she is so proud when she points it out. One day she brought me a book and pointed out letter "A"s on the pages for probably 15 minutes. It was so cute! I try to take every opportunity to show Ella the letter "A" as we are going about our daily activities. I think it is good for her to learn to recognize the letter "A" in many different situations. 

Ella loves to play with her pegs and pegboard. I tried to work on sorting colors with the pegs, as well as identifying colors, but this week she was mostly concerned with building the longest stick of pegs possible and saying "tall! tall!"

This weekend we had the opportunity to take Ella to her first University of Texas football game - this was quite the learning experience for her! There were so many things to watch and learn about at the game. She had fun clapping along with the crowd, identifying the longhorns that were everywhere, watching the football game, as well as learning about the band.

Tot School: Week 6

-Ella is currently 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

One of Ella's favorite things to do over the past several months is to put things into containers, take (dump!) them out, and put them back in again. After I saw this particular idea (straws into a container) I knew Ella would love doing this activity and it would be a great time for her to work on her fine motor skills. I was right - she loved it! She played with this all week long!

Ella is still a little bit too young for me to venture into making cookies from scratch with her (I think she'd get bored with the activity before we finished), but my mom had the idea a while back to make cookies using the pre-made cookie dough. The week after Halloween I spotted these pumpkin cookies on clearance, and thought they'd be perfect for us to make.

Ella loved that they had pumpkins on them since we've been doing a lot of stuff with pumpkins lately.

I turned the light on in the oven, and showed her how to watch for the cookies bake.  Of course, she had to have her monkey with her! :)

While the cookies finished baking, Ella wanted to color. Once they had cooled off, she tasted the cookies, and loved them! (See the huge bite she is taking, lol!)

We continued to do a little work on recognizing the letter A. She loves to say "A for Apple" but hadn't really been recognizing the letter A when I asked her about it, until last night. Last night she identified the letter A several times! We'll continue to reinforce the letter A this week.

We also did some coloring activities with turkeys (since Thanksgiving is coming up very soon, yay!). I hope to do something along the lines of this Thanksgiving turkey activity this week.

Tot School: Week 5

-Ella is 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This week we continued to work on learning colors; however, most of our play focused on sorting/matching colors rather than actually identifying colors (although we did do a little work on identifying colors). I made a very simple activity for her to work on. I laminated a blue piece of construction paper and a yellow piece of construction paper, as well as a few shapes in blue and yellow. I had her practice sorting the yellow shapes onto the yellow piece of construction paper, and the blue shapes onto the blue piece of construction paper. This task was very easy for her! In fact, not long after she started, she purposefully would place a shape incorrectly, and look to me to see if I noticed. Such a silly girl!

Ella also continues to thoroughly enjoy coloring. She has been asking multiple times a day to get in her seat to color. I printed several coloring sheets from Crayola's website to use. I'll be hunting down some Thanksgiving themed coloring sheets for her to use this coming week.

Ella loves to be outside, and she had so much fun running around grabbing the "marcorns" (aka "acorns"). She loved putting them in her pumpkin. One day we went to the park, and she enjoyed watching a squirrel run around. She also loved going up and down the steps at the park's gazebo (the second picture is taken at the gazebo).

Teaching Ella about God and spiritual things is incredibly important to me, and I hope to be able to share different things we do each week in regards to spiritual Tot School as well. This week we used these creation cards from Apologetic Press.

Tot School: Week 4

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This past week was pretty busy, and I didn't get as much in as I would have liked; however, Ella still had plenty of opportunities to learn and explore!

Ella loves playing with her blocks. We practice counting (she can consistently count to "6" now, and sometimes even makes it to "10"!), colors, sorting, building, and letter recognition with these blocks.

Ella also loves to play and learn with her puzzles. She has gotten so good with them that she'll purposefully put a piece in the wrong place to see if we notice - she loves to test us! Ella has several puzzles, but we've been using a shape puzzle (similar to this one) and a couple of different animal puzzles recently.

We continue to work on learning our colors, and this week I introduced this dinosaur file folder color matching game. Ella loves playing with it! I think it helps that it uses dinosaurs - she really likes dinosaurs!

Ella also had an opportunity this week to take a really long road trip with her daddy. She had lots of time to learn about different kinds of vehicles on the road, and she loves to point out the big trucks!

If you've been keeping up with my posts about learning activities I've been doing with Ella, you know that I'm constantly on the lookout for new blogs and websites that have activities I can do with her. Here are a few sites I've recently come across that I've found to be very helpful. I can't wait to implement some of the great ideas I've read on these sites.

• Confessions of a Homeschooler (I've mentioned this one a few times)
• 1+1+1=1 (The host blog of Tot School)
• Counting Coconuts
• Totally Tots
• No Time For Flash Cards