Is your house gripped by Olympic mania? My kids are too young to really get it, but even my non-athletic five year old has been talking about sports, thanks to her camp counselors. We’ve been looking for other ways that fit into our nearly-TV-free lifestyle to celebrate the Olympics and honor their tradition of effort…
Yes, I’ve come to love my repurposed little mason jars. (My favorite brand of spagetti sauce comes in a mason jar, but really any glass jar will work.) One of our favorite craft ideas is a kids project with cereal sprinkles. While I am super handy and pretty creative, I have not ever claimed to be “crafty,…
Recognizing words and knowing immediately what it says is important for children to properly learn to read. Visual memory is what helps a child recognize a word. Parents often want to know how to improve their child’s memory and improve their reading skills. (For a more in depth description of all the techniques needed to…
It might come as a shock, but there are good reasons why parents should not name the letters in the alphabet. Naming Problems One of the reasons why parents should not name letters is because many children have “naming” problems. Naming problems mean children have difficulty in the speed and accuracy with which they can…
I know what you’re thinking. Do kids really need more toys? But hear me out. The holiday season is filled with gifts and presents. And you’d rather that your preschooler gets a toy that would teach him something rather than just add to toy clutter, right? So, check out these awesome educational toys for toddlers…
As a mother of toddlers and preschoolers I know that what keeps my children’s attention one day might not work the next. I try to be intentional in creating fun, age-appropriate learning experiences for my kids every day, and have come up with some frugal ways to make that happen. Here are some everyday items…
Last week in our post Top 100 Sight Words and How to Teach Them, we discussed how sight words are words that aren’t “sounded out” like other words, but are memorized to learn reading. They are words like “at, the, of, it” – words that appear over and over again on a page of text….
An understanding of time is one of the most valuable intellectual tools we have for organizing huge amounts of information. One way to approach this topic is to create a set of large rectangular sheets (with the long dimension going horizontally). Each sheet will then cover a particular time span such as: Modern times (…
My 4-year-old uses my iPhone so much that I bought her an iPad. Part learning tool and part gaming device, the iPhone (and now the iPad) has been an indispensable part of our homeschooling. On and off, I’ve let iPhone apps teach my daughter reading skills. The best part? She doesn’t feel like she’s doing…
Today, many people believe that reading as early as possible is what’s best for preschoolers. That’s why many parents start reading and reading readiness activities with 2 and 3-year-old children. We experience this regularly at the Reading Kingdom when parents ask why we discourage any use of the program with children under-four years. It’s easy…
