Day of the Child and Book Giveaways

I wanted to share with you some great giveaways going on right now!

Last weekend I took my two granddaughters to a wonderful celebration of Day of the Child-Day of the Books (El día de los niños-El día de los libros). They made books from folded paper, listened to stories, played with play dough, made pinwheels, listened to lively Latin music and received lots of gifts including several nice books. I didn't know that this has been celebrated in Latin America for some time and is just now arriving here to the United States. Read more about it here.

Spanglish Baby (an incredible resource if you haven't checked it out yet) is giving away a book called Book Fiesta that has beautiful illustrations. Click here to enter this giveaway. It ends at midnight on Sunday, May 3rd.

The Latin Baby Book Club is giving away a book a day this week to celebrate El día de los niños/El día de los libros! Be sure to check out their giveaways every day. Click here to enter the giveaway.

Can I? Short Vowel Word Game

I decided it would be fun to review reading words with all of the short vowel sounds. I had the idea to have the sentence "Can I _____ the ______?" and then have two piles of words, one pile has verbs (only simple short vowel words) to put in the first blank and the second pile has nouns (only simple short vowel words) to put int he second blank. She will get some silly phrases like, "Can I rip the sock?" and then more normal phrases like, "Can I hug the Mom?" We do a couple of these a day and she enjoys it. If you are going to print these, you have to save the first picture (above) as a .jpg. The rest should just print fine by clicking "more" and then "print." You might just want to print one sheet of verbs and one sheet of nouns to see if your kids like it :) The first four sheets are the nouns, the last two sheets are the verbs. My mom is going to use this with the grandchildren she is visiting right now and wanted me to post this. Hope someone else can use this too!

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Click on "more" above the documents and then press "print"

Fantastic Resource

There is this wonderful resource that I have been using and checking out. There is a free homeschool resource everyday. On Monday they send out a list of all the resources available for the week. You can check them out and come back to download the ones you want.

This weekend in honor of the 234th anniversary of Paul Revere's Ride they are giving away four
wonderful resources all related to Revere and the history surrounding his midnight ride. Here's the complete rundown:

Listen My Children (MP3 audio) -
This a great half hour audio story about Revere's long life and influence, including the events of
that fateful night, as originally dramatized on the radio program "Cavalcade of America", in December, 1952.

"Listen My Children" Listening Guide (PDF ebooklet) -
This PDF discussion guide with background info and questions to accompany the above audio program.

Paul Revere's Ride (MP3 audio) -
A wonderful dramatic performance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic poem,
"Paul Revere's Ride" as performed by Frederic March.

An art study lesson focusing on paintings & sculptures depicting Paul Revere (as well as
the Minutemen), courtesy of Yes You Can! Publications. This is lots of fun and a great way to combine history with art appreciation & hands-on activities to boot.

Check it out at http://www.homeschoolfreebieoftheday.com

Teaching Ch, Th, and SH

My two year old knows all of her letter sounds, so I have been introducing some digraphs (two letters that together make a new sound). My mom likes to introduce these while the kids are learning normal letters because they learn them just like they are another letter. We use the letter sound cards you can find here.

Now I take two sounds like Ch and Sh. I have her put both of the cards down. Then I give her a picture (sometimes I tell her a little story as I explain each one). She has to put the picture in the right column on the floor (under the ch or the sh). We do a lot of repetition, reviewing the sounds and names of all the things aloud after we have put down a couple of pictures and then when we are done after about four pictures under each digraph.

My mom told me today another game she likes to do is like slap jack. The way you
play is have a bunch of cards with just ch, sh and th on them. You make a big deck, as you flip each one, you tell her to only slap the one of them, only the ch for example. I can't wait to try this tomorrow.

Just click here to see the sheets of pictures of words starting ch, sh and th my mom created. The last document I created could be printed and cut out to make a slap jack game.

*To print, click on more above each picture and click print. I'm trying a new way to upload word documents. Tell me if it doesn't work :)

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction Other funny pictures

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction Other funny pictures

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction Other funny pictures

Publish at Scribd or explore others: job career

Johanna makes a book or worksheet for her daughter every morning. They are so cute and I thought someone else might want to print some up for their beginning readers. So here is a cute one. This one is more of a worksheet for cut and paste activities.

Sight Words Dice Game

My daughter has been having a harder time with learning her sight words, especially for a word like the. She can't sound it out exactly and doesn't like going over her sight word cards. So, I decided to make a fun game out of it. I made a simple die to help her learn some sight words. It took me about 5-10 minutes to create this, print it out on some orange card stock paper, cut it out and glue it together! We use a simple program called Scrapbook Factory Deluxe to do all the worksheets and activities for learning to read. I thought I would share the die template with you, so hopefully it will only take you a few minutes to create a die if you want to use it :) You could always take the image and erase the words (by covering it with white square or something) and then type or write down your own words you want to work on with your child.


Click on the image above to be taken to a screen that you can print to full page size.

*Other games to play to review sight words-
-Slap the Word- Lay out the words in front of the child. Say a word and they have to slap the right word.
-Hide and Seek- One child hides the sight words in the room while the other child leaves the room. When the child looking for the sight words find them, she/he has to say what word they are.
-Jump Up- Lay out the words in front of the child. Say a word and they have to pick that word up and jump up and sit back down as fast as they can.

Patience with Teaching

Children are extremely sensitive. Not only are they affected by how we treat them, but they can detect real sincerity. I have found as I work with my daughters, if I am not really enjoying working with them (just pretending to have a good attitude) they can instantly sense it. They don't work as well. It's incredible how they can figure out sincerity! Maybe it is because they are so genuine themselves.


As I was working with my daughter with reading, we were reviewing some words she had read the previous day. She kept on making mistake after mistake. I started getting frustrated thinking I had spent so much time with her on these words and now she did not even know them. As our reading time continued, her reading became worse and worse. We ended with both of us feeling frustrated.


In my mind, I remembered a story shared by Shinichi Suzuki in his book Ability Development from Age Zero. He shared the following:


Here is another case which shows that happiness develops ability.

There was one child in my family with a learning disability. His mother scolded him very much when he was six. She said that he would not remember what she taught him. For some reason he could not remember the numbers from one to ten. "Why don't you understand? This is four and this is seven!" she scolded harshly as I watched.

"It will not do any good to scold him, " I warned. After some observation, I realized that four and seven were numbers that the child was scolded about and therefore he could not look at them clearly.

"Hey, come and play with your uncle," I called.

Then I made dice out of paper and on the faces I wrote only fours and sevens.

"Let's play dice," I said, and we started to throw. A four was thrown.

"Four! I said it first. I win, " I said. Again a four was thrown.

"Four! I won again." At this point the little boy was determined to try harder. Again a four was thrown and together we said, "Four!"

"Hey, you said it too!" I praised. His eyes began to sparkle. The game continued with both fours and sevens being thrown. Sometimes I said the answer slowly. Sometime I pretended that I did not know the answer and let the boy win Sometimes I said the wrong one and the boy made no mistake. In this way four and seven became his favorite numbers in a mere ten minutes.

I had the mother write the numbers from one to ten and have the child read them. He said four and seven the quickest and in the loudest voice. These numbers had become the most well known and fun numbers.

The problem is how to combine interest and training. If a child is always scolded about four and seven, his ability will not grow. Even if a parent overflowing with love for a child uses a bad method, the ability of the child will not develop.

Suzuki, Shinichi. Ability Development From Age Zero. Tr. Mary Louise Nagata. Secaucus, New Jersey: Summy-Birchard Inc., 1981.

Isn't this so true! When I am scolded about something that I fail at or someone tells me I can't do something, I can't seem to think clearly when I try to do it again. Now every time, I start getting frustrated with my daughter. I stop and tell myself that getting frustrated will only have the opposite effect of what I want. It will only slow her progress. If I am patient and genuinely happy working with her, she will learn at her own speed. I also love how Suzuki takes the skill and breaks it down to a more simple level. I have also tried doing this. It has been incredible to see the difference this had made!