Thursday, March 29, 2007

A Shout Out to My JM Friends

I know that, being the brilliant homeschooling mom that I am, I should be able to figure out EVERYTHING on my own. After all, I'm in my second year of doing this. I've taught my daughter to read, write, spell, blah blah blah...I can't even go on, I'm laughing so hard at myself!

I was a little freaked out when Declan started asking, day after day, to do schoolwork. See, I never did any official preschool with Reilly. She just learned as we did life. I honestly don't remember actually sitting down and teaching her the letters, at least not until kindergarten, when I realized that she knew the uppercase and not the lowercase letters. So I was a little but at a loss as to how to go about teaching Declan letters.

Well, I knew just where to turn - my friends over at the JustMommies homeschooling forum! The ladies over there rallied gave me tons of hints - websites for games and printouts, games that I can play, things like that. The best tip I got, however, was the video "Leapfrog Letter Factory" which is the worlds silliest cartoon movie that teaches each of the letters and the sounds that they make, using little mnemonics. The j's are jumping on trampolines, the h's are hot, the e's can't hear and say "Eeeeh?" Declan LOVES watching it and, as a result of seeing it several times this week, can now identify probably 10 letters and their sounds. Today I was doing a little bit of "reading" with him, just writing simple three-letter words on the white board and showing him how the sounds worked together.

It so much fun, watching him learn!

On a side note, Reilly loves the video just as much as he does! *snicker, snicker!*

1 comment:

Heather the Mama Duk said...

Hmmm... I might have to try that for Cameron.

Yay, Declan!!!