Saturday, February 16, 2008

Creating Literature "units" at home

One simple way to develop themes of study at home is to base your study around a good book. There are quite a few resources out there that can help you with this. There is a whole series for early homeschooling dedicated to this called Five in a Row. This series outlines a number of activities you can do for five days in a row based on a book you are reading. Another option is the popular story stretchers series (they have a book dedicated to toddlers and then older age groups). The other day I found the book Ready for Reading which reccomends 60 different books with quick ideas about what you can do to enhance the reading and connections and then it lists"extensions" for poetry and other books to read with a similar theme. Of course you can just read the books and enjoy them on their own merit.

This is obviously not a Montessori or a Charlotte Mason approach to learning but it is a fun and easy way to organize learning in your home. It is more similar to traditional preschool approaches.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A good book you might be interested in is "The Whole Story, Natural Learning and the Acquisition of Litereacy in the Classroom" by Brian Cnambourne (ISBN 0-908643-49-7).