Friday, August 26, 2011

Homeschooling.....On the Lap


I am a mom of 6 children, who also happens to homeschool.  Changes came in 2010 when our 6th child was born and we've had to make many adjustments to our homeschooling schedule.  At the end of last year I sat down and wondered what I could do to make our day more productive, and yet still give my very needy 1 year old the attention she craves.  That's when I made the decision to start homeschooling on the lap.  I've veered toward a literature based curriculum and we sit on the couch and read our way through literature, history, science, and whatever else we want to learn about. That way my 1 year old can sit on my lap and feel like she has some sort of attention from me.  Of course we still do workbooks for Language/English and Math :).

All this to say, children need to be read to...no matter what their age.  My older girls are 8 & 9 and they still look forward to it every morning.  They write out vocabulary words they need to learn, details they find interesting, etc., which helps with comprehension.  My younger ones just love being able to hear a story and have someone read to them.  It is also building their vocabulary and you'd be amazed at what little children retain.

I'm going to try to do book reviews of what we read through.  Many of our books can be found at the library, which happens to be our second home. :)

Kristine

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am older now and we homschooled our daughter starting in 1985, until college. When she was born we decided that the house rule would be that there was no TV if our daughter was awake until she learned to read. Of course I had to read to her a lot because we had to fill up our days. We listened to music, she started to play the piano at three and she started dance lessons at four. One day just after her fourth birthday she told me she had a secret. She had been keeping it a secret that she could read for quite a while. Her reading level was about fourth or fifth grade. "Why," I asked? The answer was because she was afraid that I wouldn't read to her anymore if we knew she could read. Her father and I read aloud to her until she was in her teens. She working on her doctorate now.