One of the greatest homeschooling joys—and greatest challenges—during my thirty-two years of homeschooling has definitely been teaching my kids to read. My undergraduate degree is in elementary education, and my master’s work is in reading specialist. So, um, yeah, I should have been a specialist.
“Conjunction Junction—what’s your function?”
Did you start to sing along? Can you picture the images?
How old are you????? lol
Most kids today are not raised on “School House Rock,” which is such a shame! Because you really can’t forget the songs, jingles, rhymes—and dare I say—rules learned from those little ditties. (You can still find them on Youtube!)
And those little ditties are really needed when it comes to commas! Commas are a mystery to many people–and rightly so! They are extremely subjective at times across the board. And then, different handbooks and authorities stress different rules for them, making them even more elusive.
Teaching poetry can be a challenge. It is easy to get caught up in the mechanics of poetry when teaching about rhyme scheme. It is easy to get lost in imagery when teaching about meaning and depth of poetry.
Sometimes you just need a little fun when you’re teaching rhyme scheme—like in the Facebook Live videos that my students made of me teaching the about the importance of syllabication in rhyme scheme development—using funny rhymes and even a little rapping.
Click to watch!
I have loved teaching reading again! And I have loved creating products to use for letter recognition and sounds/letter recognition. It is so fun to work with younger children again…and makes me anxious to teach my grandkids to read (or help teach them!).
In this Wondering Wednesday video, Donna Reish, author of seventy curriculum books totaling over forty thousand pages, answers a mom’s questions about helping her son who is struggling with reading. Donna talks about readiness, creating a learning environment, combining language arts/grammar studies with reading studies, the importance of immersion in the reading process, using learning styles in teaching reading, and much more. Donna’s reading blog posts can be found here. Donna’s Wondering Wednesday podcasts and videos can be found here. Donna’s downloadable Letters and Sounds phonics programs can be found here.
![[Video] Helping Your Child With Reading Difficulties](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8542/29087567836_ebb0605741_z.jpg "[Video] Helping Your Child With Reading Difficulties")
Imagery. Word association. Similes. Metaphors. Word pictures.
How we teachers all want our students to write with all of those stylistic elements!
