Save time and simplify
your homeschooling life...
Learn from experienced
homeschoolers how to write your own curriculum.
It really is that easy!
Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned. As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful. Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content. |
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"Thank you so much for your wonderful website! I was getting quiet frustrated with finding appropriate information on homeschooling - thanks to your website we are now on the right track... Using your checklists for reassurance helped me to have the confidence to come up with my own programme that suits our needs." Rachael "I'm a frequent visitor to your website... I gain valuable knowledge from your website, luckily recommended in the very early stages of our homeschooling journey." Geradine "I checked out your website today and was incredibly impressed by it. I can tell it will be a great resource for our family for many years. THANKS for all the hard work that has gone into making homeschooling easier and much less isolating for families like us." Cynthia |
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© Beverley Paine
Thomas began learning to read and write at around age four, but took another eight or so years to really get started.... these were years in which I alternated between confident faith in his ability and sheer panic. Along the way I tried many techniques to improve his progress, and the most successful of these was teaching Thomas to recognise on sight some of the most commonly used words in our language. I added to these words he would come across fairly frequently, like our names and pet names, address and so on.
The following words actually make up half of all reading and writing we do, and unlocking the power in sentences to make sense by giving Thomas the ability to decode these really seemed to spur his development along. Of course, the timing may have been just perfect for him. Because I only came across this list when he was around ten years of age I have no idea how effective it might have been when he was five or six!
If you are interested in teaching your child to read by this method you could try the 'look, read, cover, write and check' method of learning these words from a list, starting with around five a day. Many of these words are not the best words to introduce phonetically and are generally learned much later, by sight. Often by the time a child has phonetic pronunciation and reading under way these words simply fall into place without any effort. Not so Thomas, who never got the hang of decoding words phonetically at all. He tended to use whatever methods came to hand at the time - usually asking for help.
I was very careful to introduce as many of these words in a sentence format, even writing and illustrating simple books which he learned to read, and which included much repetition of a selection of the words I wanted him to remember. Reading the words in a meaningful context was important, and the illustration helped remind Thomas of the action in the sentence, reminding him which word was needed to make sense of the text. I used cards, postcards, posters and lists to reinforce the use of these words in sentences.
Once Thomas mastered about 70% of this list reading began to fall into place fairly rapidly. He found that being able to recognise all the words between the nouns and verbs helped enormously.
| a | in | that | and | is |
| it | to | was | of | I |
| the | he | all | be | on |
| but | him | had | not | have |
| an | they | are | one | we |
| as | for | his | said | with |
| at | she | by | so | do |
| up | get | can | off | you |
| from | about | come | if | my |
| right | well | into | new | see |
| went | back | did | just | no |
| been | who | like | now | some |
| what | before | down | their | when |
| big | first | look | old | them |
| where | two | only | me | want |
| over | more | there | little | made |
| her | then | which | call | our |
| make | or | came | go | other |
| this | has | will | were | here |
| your | out | must | much | could |
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
Always Learnign Books
Beverley and Robin wish to thank everyone for their patience as they convert most of the Always Learning Book titles to e-book format. As each booklet becomes available it will be listed on this website.
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Text & Images on this site Copyright © 1999-2008 Beverley Paine. All rights reserved. Please note that the opinions and articles included in the suite of Homeschool Australia websites are not necessarily those of Beverley and Robin Paine, nor do we endorse or necessarily recommend products (other than our own) listed in contributed articles, links, pages, or advertisements.