First | Preparilli Press

As we enter the last month of our homeschool year, I find myself making mental notes about next year, and getting nostalgic about this one. Another school year is coming to a close. Yes, it is good to be nearing the finish line, but I want to capture where each of my kids is right now and bottle it up. What if I forget the joys from this year? And the struggles that motivated us to work harder and dig a little deeper? I want to be able to look back years from now and reminisce about our homeschool journey. So, this week I had my kids record this year’s favorites and look ahead to our summer break. Here is a look at what we used:

There is one for the boys and another for the girls. All of my children enjoyed filling in their favorites. My first grader needed a bit of help spelling a few things she wanted to write, but otherwise had fun on her own filling it in and coloring it! (The recording sheets in My Favorite Things are printer-friendly,black-and-white, and can be colored by your kids). There is also an autograph page, so you can record all your students’ signatures. Click on the picture below if you’d like to grab them to use with your kids.

Record This Year’s Favorites

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If you use Sonlight for your homeschool, then you know all about the natural reading process. You read to your children, they read to you, and then they read to themselves. It works beautifully…for some children. My first two kids had no problems. I thought, “Hmmm…not sure what I did, but these kids can read!” Now, my third child didn’t fit this same mold. He read beautifully. At first. Then, as is fitting for our dynamic language, the sounds that worked for one word, simply didn’t work for another. He started just sounding out the first letter and guessing the rest. I did my best to help him for a couple of years. I figured he was a late bloomer. And then, last summer, I read Reading Reflex.

After spending this school year working through Read America’s Reading Reflex with my eight-year old, I’ve decided to be proactive with my younger children, and not simply wait and see if the natural reading process will work for them. And so, I’ve applied the Sound Mapping technique–saying the sounds as the word is read–and rhyming, another great technique for learning the sounds in words, to the CVCe and CCVCe word families that my first grader (in Core B, starting in Week 24) is learning.

CVCe and CCVCe Word Family Printables

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Category Archives: First

Record This Year’s Favorites

Sound Mapping with Silent e