Building Better Vocabulary for Success
Please submit any ideas, programs, books, websites or games that could benefit others here. You may comment anonymously. Thank you!
Please submit any ideas, programs, books, websites or games that could benefit others here. You may comment anonymously. Thank you!
Vocabulary Challenge:
Learn One New Word a Day
Programs that teach children to read:
First Reader for ages 4 to 7
Turbo Reader designed to help all ages
Vocabulary Games & Websites
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My daughter selected My “h” Sound Box from the library. While this book didn’t look like a book I’d pick, I thought the book will be good for them. Surprise! Surprise! My son delighted in reading it to his sister and they both laughed heartily time and again without dreaming that significant learning of the letter h words was even happening. Not only do I highly recommend this book for emerging readers and under, we also intend to order every book in the series. Thank you Child’s World, Jane Belk Moncure, and Rebecca Thornburgh for producing this series.
Every writer can benefit from the thin book, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White.
Looking for a book to teach or review adverbs?
Animally is an adverb adventure.
I’d like to find some very easy books. Even 1st reader’s have way too many words for Kindergarteners struggling to read. I need very simple things with words they should know. I tutor 2 kids. And I’d like to view some pages so I can determine if it’s what I need.
Barb,
Some possibilities are at:http://discoversuccess.info/product-category/all-habits/?filtering=1&filter_age=111&filter_book-type=126
Would particularly recommend Railroad Hank. The author, Lisa Moser, uses repetition which helps struggling readers. If you click on the links, Amazon will you allow you to look inside before buying or you can check it out at the library.
Whose Shoe? by Eve Bunting, I Wish You More by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and Troto and the Trucks by Uri Shulevitz are other possibilities. If you let me know their interests, I’d be happy to supply more specific suggestions. Thanks for teaching children to read!
Barb, Forgot for even easier books, the Bob Books are another option. They are available at most libraries and Amazon allows you to look inside.
Bernard Waber uses repetition in his book, Ask Me which will help struggling readers.
Books I recommend for reading:
How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
For parents:
The Five Love Languages
Five Love Languages for Teens
Five Love Languages for Children
The Temperament God Gave You
Parenting with Grace
For young women:
For Young Women only by Shanti Feldhahn and Lisa Rice
Thank you Lynn. Appreciate your recommendations!
One of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Child
When people ask me, what is the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my whole life, I answer — teaching my six children to read before they entered school. Our family got a bigger return for the time I spent on that activity than anything else I ever did. I urge you, and your family and friends, to do likewise.
The school is the wrong place to learn how to read, anyway, because reading is a solitary, not a group, activity. Reading is not something you do with other people, like playing ball; reading is something you do with a book, and other people in the room are a bad distraction.
Reading is a skill you have to learn to do by yourself (with the help of an adult), like learning how to walk, or ride a bike, or play the piano. Did you ever hear of anyone lining up a bunch of children at pianos and saying, Now we are all going to learn how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at the same time?
When reading is taught in a classroom, most of the children spend most of their time doing “busy work” to fill up the hours. The days are so long, the repetition is so boring, the books are so stupid, the progress is so slow that so many children, who were eager to learn at the start of the first grade, become bored and disorderly by the end of the first year in school.
This is especially true of little boys who simply are not ready to sit quietly at a desk and do neat work at age five or six. Forcing little boys into a structured classroom environment, and expecting them to be quiet like little girls, is the reason why, a few years later, boys outnumber girls 13 to 1 in learning failure classes and 8 to 1 among the emotionally disturbed. You can avoid this tragedy by teaching your children to read at home.
It is terribly important that your child be taught to read by the correct method before he is taught bad habits such as pretending to read by looking at pictures and guessing at the words. Your children and grandchildren can avoid all those bad habits, and the disappointments that result, if you teach your child to read at home.
You can set your children and grandchildren on the track to a good education, so they can read well enough to get a good job and then progress in a career . . . be able to read for enjoyment and entertainment . . . be able to read the great and inspiring works of literature written in the English language . . . and have horizons of opportunity expanded by reading about the noble deeds of great Americans of achievement.
Most parents work hard to provide their children with the material things of life. Many parents work hard to provide their children with the spiritual things of life — faith in God, moral training, and good and healthy habits. There is something else you can do for your child that is important to both of these goals — because it’s the key to what your child will be able to do on his own. You can teach your child to read.
Why should you? Aren’t you paying the schools to teach your child to read? Yes, you are paying for public schools at the rate of $5,000 per child per year, but you and your neighbors are not getting your money’s worth. You should not think that your children are good readers just because they get good report cards. It’s now the fashion to give all schoolchildren happy report cards in order to build their self-esteem.
Even most of those who graduate from high school and go on to college, do not read well enough to enjoy it or to read anything important. This was pointed out by Al Shanker, longtime president of the nation’s second largest teachers union and a strong supporter of public schools, who says that even the children we think are doing OK are really not. In a remarkable 1989 speech in Denver to a closed audience of teachers, he said that only 3 to 6 percent of 17- and 18-year-olds are able to read editorials and articles in newspapers and magazines, write an essay of several pages, and solve a two-step mathematical problem. That means that 94% of public school graduates cannot do those things. He said that 80% of public school graduates cannot even write a two-paragraph letter to a supermarket manager applying for a job.
That means that, unless your child is in the top 6% of his class, he is probably not getting as good an education as your grandparents received. Under Outcome-Based Education — which eliminates traditional grading on report cards and eliminates all kinds of competition such as honor rolls and spelling bees — you will never know where your child ranks in his class, or what he is learning or not learning.
When I spoke on this subject at Baylor University, an attractive student came up to me and said, “When I entered Baylor, I discovered that I couldn’t read well enough to keep up with my courses. I had to drop out for a year and learn how to read before I continued.” She was honest about her handicap and took steps to remedy it. Most students and adults just fake it, too embarrassed for anyone to know that they cannot read.
I cannot speak highly enough of First Reader and the companion workbook. I have used it with great success for every one of my five children (usually beginning when they were age 4 – it is helpful if they have learned the alphabet and recognize the letter names) – boys and girls. My four older children (ranging in age from 12 – 18) are all very strong readers, and have been from a young age thanks to this program. My youngest (age 5) is sailing through First Reader now and loving it. It is very easy to use, requiring little preparation on the part of the parent. It uses the well-tested and effective phonics approach, along with sight words (such as “you, the, I” and others) introduced gradually. By the end of the book, the child is reading sentences, poems, and short stories. The child can read five-syllable (and longer) words, and has a wealth of vocabulary in his/her reading ability, because of the deciphering tools the phonics method provides. I love, love, love this program, and strongly recommend it to parents for their children!
Thanks so much for this, Mrs. Wilkin. Phyllis often says that her greatest achievement is teaching her 6 children to read!