by Donna | Oct 5, 2015
Second Grade: Pen for your student for as long as necessary.
Children often think they cannot write because they do not have the penning skills to compose sentences or paragraphs or the spelling skills to spell the words they want to use. Right off the bat, the young child grows to dislike writing. He feels inadequate (and thus, the many “I don’t know how to write” or “I’m bad at writing” mentalities of this age group).
Usually a child’s creativity and thinking processes are way above their small motor and spelling skills. That is, a child can think (and orally compose) way above what he can write (spelling-wise and writing mechanics-wise) or spell (encoding; just because a child can “decode”—sound out words—does not mean he can ‘’encode”—spell the words). This is where penning for your student (especially for dyslexic/dysgraphic ones and/or “late bloomers”) makes the difference between your child seeing himself as a writer or as a student who is “behind.”
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by Donna | Sep 29, 2015
Fifteen years ago I began writing my complete language arts program for second through twelfth grade students (what is now Character Quality Language Arts, CQLA). I based that program, loosely, on six programs (language arts, editing, writing, vocabulary, spelling, etc., programs) that I had been using for a dozen years with my older children. I wanted to take all of the best “part language arts” books and put them together in one. And I did that!
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by Donna | Sep 28, 2015
First Grade: Don’t rush “writing” when a child is learning to read.
I haven’t taught first grade in ten years. I have missed teaching a child to read—so much that I have actually considered trying to get some hours at a tutoring center just to be able to teach beginning reading again. (I know; I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to teaching!)
Notice this tip is in the first grade paragraph—not the kindergarten one. My children learned to read in first or second grade (okay, um, two in third).
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by Donna | Aug 24, 2015
I have probably said this a thousand times in the past twenty years of speaking to and writing for homeschooling moms: do your dailies! I learned this the hard way (by not doing my dailies!), and once I learned this TRICK (and it does work like magic, so I guess you can call it a trick!), my days were amazingly better.
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by Donna | Aug 17, 2015
The first day was a bust. The first week was less glamorous, productive, and family-unifying than you envisioned it. So what is the natural reaction to that?
The natural reaction is to doubt. Doubt that God called you to this. Doubt that you can do it—regardless of the calling. Doubt that you are the best teacher for your children. Wowsie, even doubt that you are a good parent at all!
But how does God want us to react to less than perfect beginnings? Knowing the character of God—merciful, wisdom, loving, kind, instructive—we can know that there are probably two reactions that God would have us ponder:
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