Engaging the Whole Family in the Educative Process

When your child attends preschool, the teachers, administrators and room parents often work together as a team to keep parents informed and engaged. When you home school, this picture is painted a bit differently. As the parent and teacher, I am holding the reins and driving my son's education forward with our curriculum and day to day activities. So it may seem like family engagement wouldn't play a role in our education style, but it does.

If you've kept up with our family over the last year, you know that we use and love a prepackaged curriculum called Mother Goose Time. The program includes all of the lesson plans, adaptive strategies, manipulatives and creative work needed to educate your toddler or preschool at home, in a more traditional preschool setting or in a daycare setting. This includes newsletters, information and questions that a teacher would send home to parents to help them not only understand what their child is learning, but ask informed questions that start meaningful conversations, after school is done for the day.

As a homeschooler of an only child, I don't want these tools to go to waste, so we use them to create conversations with other family members. When Dad gets home from work he checks out the questions on the newsletter or invitation to create to start a conversation at dinner. When my son goes to his grandparents house, he is often sent with the daily topic poster, an artistic activity and a book all from Mother Goose Time.

There are also weekends where Dad takes over completely. My husband, lover of animals, has rescued turtles, snakes and more over the years. Some have been kept as pets and others donated to a local wildlife sanctuary. This week with Mother Goose Time we have been talking about the many animals that live in the rain forest. When I noticed our snake had shed (I get that that's not an every household occurrence) I asked my husband to run the show and take over home school on that Sunday afternoon. My husband and son discussed sizes, patterns, and used bubble wrap and the snake shed to create a beautiful painting. You will be surprise how the random knowledge or expertise from a spouse or grandparent will come in handy one day!

Being read to and taught by different adults helps build a child's comprehension and ability to engage in dialogue. So while my husband can't be at home for lunch to help my son with pattern puzzles, he can read my son his monthly Mother Goose Time book and ask him questions that might be different than mine.

Whether you are a homeschooler, or parent hoping to broaden your child's vocabulary, perspective and reasoning skills, I encourage you to reach out to family and friends and get them involved you your child's learning. We have been lucky to receive this month's proram in exchange for our experiences. Also, check out Mother Goose Time, their program makes an excellent, creative supplement to young learning, that will also guide you as the parent along the way.

Where We are on Our Reading Journey

This year, our local library joined the 1,000 books before Kindergarten initiative. We have been on this bandwagon for a while now, and I think it's a great call to parents of the youngest babies to begin reading as soon and you wipe the sleeplessness and coffee haze out of your eyes.

When my son was teeny tiny, he would hoot and holler after his bath and while being changed into his pajamas. The only thing that would calm him was reading a Star Wars ABC book. It got to the point that I would recite, "A is for Anakin, Anakin is an Amazing Jedi...B is for Boba Fett..." when my son would wake up for a night feed, to lull him back to sleep. We would flip through the pages and his eyes would widen at the bold character and rhythmic lines.

While I refuse to credit Star Wars for my son being an early ABC aficionado, I do believe reading to him everyday from the week he came home from the hospital helped.

Fast forward and he is three years old and we are mixing my own phonics style with the multi-faceted Mother Goose Time curriculum.

We began by pointing to words in books and on signs that we notice in our everyday life. I then came across this series of Montessori books, and the Letter Work book has been a staple in our home for over a year. While a full Montessori style of education wouldn't suit my son that has some emotional and sensory regulation issues, I do love the sandpaper letter and number system. They enhance memorization and pre-writing skills.

Everyday, we spent 5 minutes going through this book to solidify each letter's sound and tracing the letter shape. I love that the book reminds the adult and child the correction pronunciation, like "K - KUH like in King." Sometimes as adults we had in our own preformed habits, like saying K - KAH. So I appreciate this books style.

Next we moved on to CVC flash cards and Montessori reading blocks. While I am not a flash card person per say, I do like the simple three letter word on the front and image on the back. My son wants to guess based on the picture, which is okay, he is using context, but that isn't going to work in the future when there are several words on the page. We do a handful of either method at the dinner table most nights.

Then I began my search for early or pre-reader books. We found the Bob books, but at times they incorporated a few too many sight words for a first book. We then found the Flip a Word books at the library. My son really enjoys these. He does try to guess the words based on the pictures, but when it comes time to read the full sentence, I cover the picture with printer paper and then do a little reveal when he's completed the sentence.

We also love how our Mother Goose Time curriculum subscription box incorporates early literacy skills. Every month, we receive a book, magnetic story pieces, and I Can Read book, which combines sight words with words that follow phonetic rules. My son loves using the arrow pointers to read his book. He also enjoys having a book than he can color in and customize. The Mother Goose Time monthly books also do an excellent job of introducing literacy skills. The books follow the monthly theme and engage the children by asking questions, highlighting certain words and most importantly reinforcing the importance of comprehension. This year, Mother Goose Time introduced magnetic story pieces that have been a big hit.

Mother Goose Time sets up the story to make the book a reading experience one that lasts over the whole month. First we read the story. Then we re-read and use the story pieces to act out the story as we read it. Then I ask my son to retell the story with the pieces on our magnetic chalk board. Next, we often do a craft surrounding the topic and incorporating language from the story. Finally, we do a puzzle that is made up of an image from that story.

As a parent who is supplementing their child's education with Mother Goose Time, I don't keep a physical portfolio to track learning, but rather a simple two part method. First I photograph everything. I'm already a Momarazzi type of mom, so this comes easily. I then save his Mother Goose Time learning photos in a Flickr folder. I also save the projects he does and really loves in a Rubbermaid box under the bed. Also in that box, I save the I Can Read books and pointers. Every month or so, I pull out one or two older books to re-read and reinforce his learning. I also tend to leave out a book if the words haven't really stuck in his brain that month.

In this way, Mother Goose Time does an excellent job of repeating and reinforcing a concept in a way that is fun and new for the child that seeks novelty. If we are reading about a bear in winter, we might see the word snow, which is a word that we haven't covered in our CVC cards, but a word that pops up in the lives of children on a regular basis. Over the last week my son has seen the word in his Mother Goose Time books, activities and art projects, so now, snow is an easily recognizable word that he can find going forward when we read our bedtime stories. If you have a child ramping up to read, I highly recommend jumping on the 1,000 books before Kindergarten and Mother Goose Time bandwagons. Feel free to check out the other resources as well and see what works for your early reader! This month, we are lucky to have received the curriculum box in exchange for sharing our experience.