Adventures in Reading

So, reading is obviously an important subject for the students enrolled in The Doyle Home School. Interestingly, although this is our sixth year of homeschooling, I haven't exclusively taught any of our girls to read. Both Madeleine and Mia attended kindergarten so by the time they came home to learn, they were already reading at least a little. I remember thinking that Madeleine's kindergarten reading program was very strange. After spotting the alphabet cards displayed in her classroom, I went home and asked Chris exactly how much we were paying the school to teach our daughter that "cat" starts with "F" and "tire" with "S". As it turned out, the hissing cat was supposed to represent the F sound and the tire losing air, S. Still, we spent many interesting evenings trying to figure out what the pictures were supposed to be. Chris had us rolling with his unique take on it.

These days, I am teaching Grace and Sophie to read. With Sophie, I'm using the 100 easy lessons book. Grace and I are working our way through a variety of readers including Bob Books, Modern Curriculum Press' books and Hooked on Phonics.

Yesterday, Grace and I were working in our reading corner under the friendly eye of Hugh Laurie (very inspiring). The reader we were using was called Fog. If you've ever worked with readers, you know how silly some of the sentences and "stories" are. This one was like that. It talked about going for a jog in the fog. After that, I think the two characters ended up running into a dog they thought was a log. I had Grace reread quite a few words and even sentences so by the time we'd finished, she had read the little book a handful of times. In the middle of it all, Sophie, who was coloring quietly at her desk, piped up with, "Why do you guys have to jog in the fog?" Her tone indicated how ridiculous she thought we were. Grace and I just laughed which made Sophie mad because her question had in fact been a serious one. Hopefully she'll find it funnier by the time she is able to read well enough to read this post.

our reading corner

Chris, trying out sit-upons for our reading corner.

I ended up using things we already had.

Have you tried a bean bag lately? Not comfortable at all.