My Nest is Best {5 Days of Picture Books}

I've been contemplating the "Stay Home Stay Safe" mantra that is currently our social norm. One of the things I've come to realise is that I have had the privledge of staying home for the last three decades.  My home is my haven and I love to be here.  However this isolation is NOT our normal.  I am missing my home educating friends and their famlies. I am missing my family.  I am missing my community.  However I am greatful for the blessings that I do have.    Dwelling on what I don't have is not healthy.  We are created to think and meditate on the good things we do have and as such it's time to start listing the positives of the Stay Home Mandate we are living through.

Yesterday I shared five picture books to read out loud.  Today I'd like to share one of my favourites:  My Nest is Best by P.D. Eastman.

{Please note that the links below to Book Depository are affiliate links.  You will not pay more for the books however I will receive a commision should you choose to purchase a book from them} 

My Nest is Best 

• For ages 0-5
• Format Board book | 14 pages
• Dimensions 150.88 x 212.85 x 14.48mm | 244.94g
• Publication date 24 May 2005
• Publisher Random House USA Inc
• Imprint Random House Books for Young Readers
• Language English
• Illustrations note Colour Illustrations
• ISBN10 037583267X
• ISBN13 9780375832673 

About PD Eastman

• He is an author/illustrator of children's books
• Trained at the National Academy of Design
• Sold more than 30 million books
• Was in the army with Theodor Geisel who became known as Dr. Seuss

Other Titles by PD Eastman

• Are You My Mother?
• Go, Dog. Go!
• The Best Nest
• Sam and the Firefly
• Red, Stop! Green, Go! 
• Flap Your Wings 
• Big Dog . . . Little Dog 
• The Alphabet Book 
• Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary 

Do you have a favourite picture book Author?

Picture Books to Read out Loud {5 Days of Picture Books}

A few weeks back Sonlight asked:  Name a picture book that you never tire of reading aloud.  Since many of us are now in isolation and Quarantine-schooling I thought I'd share some of the suggestions with you.

{Please note that the links below to Book Depository are affiliate links.  You will not pay more for the books however I will receive a commision should you choose to purchase a book from them} 

"Stand Back," said the elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!"

Blueberries for Sal

Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel

Are You My Mother?

 

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Have you read any of these?  We have read and enjoyed a few of them over the years and I'm certainly looking forward to reading them to my grand children one day.

What are your favourite read aloud picture books? 

ASD Reading {Review}

Teaching students to read, write and comprehend can sometimes be a rather anxiety producing journey especially when it seems like it's taking your student a long time to learn a particular skill.  Through in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) into the mix and it becomes a whole new ball game.

Nathaniel was diagnosed with ASD last year and to be honest it was kind of a relief to know because now we are able to source resources to assist him better on his journey to reading and writing well.   In the arena of reading, writing and comprehension Nathaniel is a competent reader and he has a great comprehension but encoding has been a struggle.  Recently we were  asked by Reading Kingdom Kingdom to trial their ASD Reading online program.

"ASD Reading is based on the groundbreaking work of Dr. Marion Blank, a world-renowned literacy and language expert who developed and served as Co-Director of the Columbia University Developmental Neuropsychiatry Program for Autism and Related Disorders."

What we received

• One year of access to the online ASD Reading (Autism Spectrum Disorder Reading) Program

ASD Reading teaches your children in the following six areas:

1. Phonics (Sounds)
2. Sequencing
3. Writing
4. Meaning
5. Grammar
6. Comprehension

How we used it
Signing up to ASD Reading was a really easy smooth process. I received an email from support welcoming us to the program.  This email had a some helpful links and advice on how to use the program along with a link to a tutorial on how to use the program effectively at home. You are also encouraged to contact support any time you have questions or concerns.

You can use your user name or your email to log in.  As the parent you have the option of creating a user name and password for your student to use to log in OR you can log in and click on the student name in order for them to use the program.

When the student page opens you can see their name at the top followed by a summary of how many times a week the student is using the program.  It is recommended that the student use the program once a day five days a week.  This facilitates long term memory retention of the skills learned.

As the student progresses through the program they are able to see at a glance how far through the level they are through the bar progress chart.  To do their days work they click on the dinosaur.

ASD students are highly visual.  On the home page both you the parent and the student can see at a glance what they are working on and the level of proficiency the student has via the icons in each area.

For example the thumbs up means completed, The hour glass means that this level is currently in progress, a tick means it is not required and the cup means Excellent Performance.

One of the main requirements is that the parent NOT help the student. This makes the students learning more effective as the program adjusts to their speed.  The goal is long term memory retention through regular small lessons.

Here is a sample of one of the pages.  The hanger has the sound we are focusing on.  The little boys in the pockets are each holding a word.  The coach is asking for the word bird.  The student is required to click on the correct word. The top right of the page shows the number of points scored so far for the entire program.

The lessons teach the word, the spelling of the word and the sound of the word.  Each lesson uses multiple disciplines to reinforce the new word learned.  The student has to select items representing the word, memorize and then type the word being learned, next they are shown multiple possible words with missing letters to form the word in which they need to select the correct one for the word and then type in the word to complete it.

The ASD Reading website says that each level should take 10-15 weeks to complete, but when you break it down, that’s about two weeks per book. In Level One you learn 36 new words, however, you don’t only learn the words, you learn many variants of that word as well.
For example, a child might learn the word “park”, but then he will also learn the variants “parks”, “parking” and “parked”. So in reality Nathaniel will be learning a lot more than 36 words in Level One.

Type in the word being learned.

Nathaniel likes earning points in order to open his passport and receive stamps.

Cost of ASD Reading

• Sign Up for a 30 Day FREE trial
• There are a number of pricing options available. 

Recommended Age Range

• ASD Reading is aimed at students in the age bracket of 4 to 10 years old.

Connect with ASD Reading




For more information on ASD Reading be sure to look at:

• Parents FAQ area which covers numerous areas.
• Resources to help your ASD student
• Books to equip you

Children on the spectrum tend to like the security of 'sameness' and ASD Reading is consistent and does not change things up which in turn enables the student to confidently use the program as they know what is going to happen and how it is going to happen.  Nathaniel appreciated the fact that this reading program gives precise and clear instructions. He is able to use ASD Reading without my help.

I appreciate the encouraging feedback he receives as well as the points scored for working through the program which are very motivating for my son. The lessons have colorful pictures that are fun and engaging. Often times he calls out to me "hey Mom look at these cute ..."

Overall, I am very happy with ASD Reading and would encourage students who are on the spectrum and struggling to learn to read and write to try ASD Reading.

Blessings
Chareen

Sir N read his first book !

The day has finally arrived!  I so enjoy this moment.  I love watching the wonder glow all over their little faces as they finally decode their first words. 

So proud of you Sir N

Factors influencing learning to read (Part 5 of 5)

Is Left / Right brain dominance important ?

One day I was reading about brain gym and read about the idea of brain dominance.  Basically we have two hemispheres, the left and right.  In young children these have equal dominance but somewhere around the age of five to seven the two sides argue about who is in charge and one side wins making it the dominant hemisphere.  This is an important step in learning to read.  If there is no dominant hemisphere the brain argues with itself as to who is in charge of this thing called reading.  Once you have brain dominance the brain happily assigns responsibility and learning to read becomes an easier journey.

Easy test for brain hemisphere dominance

• To test for dominance get your student to stand with feet together, arms at side and eyes closed
• Keeping their eyes closed, get your student to Lift their arms shoulder height
• With their eyes still closed get them to bring their hands together in the front but not touching.

 I asked my rose Miss J to do a photo story illustrating the method.

• If dominance has occurred one hand will be slightly higher than the other. 
• If equal dominance is present the hands will be perfectly alined.

Where did all this information leave me ?

I felt so much better equipped to teach my children and more relaxed over reading skills. Learning to read was dependent on so many more factors than me doing daily drills, or the perfect curriculum.

It depends on the individual child's physical, emotional, psychological readiness to read as well as whether or not they have learned the necessary tools to decode the words on the page.

This is bit a small summary of the many and varied reasons for why some take longer than others to learn to read.  There is a ton of information out there today.  This is all I was able to find out 13 years ago.

If you know of anything of interest I would love to hear about it so leave a comment.

A side note: Some children have very special learning needs (such as dyslexia) in their individual path to reading and will cost a lot of time in research but the time invested is so worth the dividend of being their at their personal ah ha moment when all the pieces fall into place and they read to you for the first time.

If you have had an experience with teaching special needs children to read, blog about it and send me the link and I will and add it here.

Other posts you might enjoy
Other posts you might enjoy

• Factors influencing Learning to Read - Part 0.1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 2 
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 3
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 4

*-*-*-*-*

Factors influencing learning to read (Part 4 of 5)

I continued on my quest to understand the physical mechanics of learning to read.  It was around this time that I read Dare to Discipline by Dr James Dobson.


What does the Meylin Sheath have to do with reading ?

In his book Dr Dobson quoted some interesting information concerning the Myelin sheath.

The myelin sheath in essence is the covering over our nervous system, much like the outer plastic on an electrical cable.  It acts as an insulator to stop nerve impulses from going "missing".

So what you ask does this have to do with reading? When we are born our myelin sheath is not complete and that is why babies have no co ordination.  As the sheath grows so does the child's ability to do things grow. The sheath grows very slowly and the process can take up to 12 years or more to complete.

Interestingly the optic nerve and the bladder are two of the last areas to be covered in the body.  This explains why one day children can read a simple book and then tomorrow they just can't 'remember' how or why children who are bed wetters suddenly become dry.

It's not so much memory or ability that's the problem it is that the information is getting "lost" between the eye and the brain as a result of the sheath being incomplete.  So as this sheath completes it's growth children "suddenly" gain the ability to read.

This information was accidentally discovered when doctors were trying to figure out why patients undergoing chemo therapy lost the ability to read or suddenly became uncoordinated. They ascertained that chemo unwraps the myelin sheath and once chemo stops and the sheath repairs itself, patients regain their "lost" ability.

 Other posts you might enjoy
Other posts you might enjoy

• Factors influencing Learning to Read - Part 0.1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 2 
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 3
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 5

Factors influencing learning to read (Part 3 of 5)

Does Doing life equip us to read ?

I was reading about some research done with preschool students. Two classes were formed.  One class was taught standard phonics and official school drills the other was taken on school trips to museums, play grounds, theater, had books read to them and did lots of discovering the world around them experiments such as growing beans in class.

If my memory serves me right - after three years each class was divided in half and combined with the other.  So the new class consisted of 50% of each of the original classes. Within three months the students who had done no formal learning to read lessons were reading up to three years above their chronological age.

The reasons touted were that the students who explored the world around themselves had a deeper understanding of vocabulary and a larger bank of vocabulary to draw from.  So when they started learning to read they only had one skill to learn, the skill of decoding the symbols on the page. Most young students are trying to attain a double skill the skill of decoding and the skill of understanding the word they are decoding at the same time. (sorry I can't remember where I read about this research.  If anyone recognizes it please let me know so I can give appropriate credit)

To keep doing life made sense, and did set my mind at ease that what we were doing was making a difference. Whenever I feel a little guilty doing life I remember what Ruth Beechick has to say about it. (Read about it in this blog post: No need to feel guilty !

Practical tools

Time to go back to the tool box. I am sure Sonlight had added some how to books in with my order.  They must be important  ???

I took out my books by Ruth Beechick which Sonlight had graciously added to my order as a thank you gift. I read A home start in Reading. I highly recommend this book (it has now been combined into one book called: The Three R's ).

Ruth did an amazing job of equipping my understanding of how and when to teach phonics, how to know when my student was ready to learn, and how to develop comprehension skills. These little books (now in one book) are worth their weight in gold!

Feeling better equipped we continued with our daily phonics books (Get ready for the code) and sat together reading great books from Sonlight Core K (now called Core A) But I still worried and fretted over the whole thing.

Some tools of interest

• Teaching reading with beginner readers (Sonlight)
• Who wants to be a reader by Homeschool.com
• Phonics vs Whole Language by Succeed to Read 

Factor 3 is becoming equipped with the tools that are needed to teach this precious skill of decoding letters on a page. 

What tools do you have in your tool box ?

Other posts you might enjoy
Other posts you might enjoy

• Factors influencing Learning to Read - Part 0.1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 2 
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 4
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 5

Factors influencing learning to read (Part 1 of 5)

This 5 day series of posts has been born out of a friends Facebook status expressing her concerns for her son who was struggling to learn his phonics rules. This in turn brought forth a cascade of memories from years ago when I first started homeschooling and was wrestling with my children learning to read.

I remember we had been homeschooling for around six months and my beautiful bed of roses was very quickly turning into a handful of thorns!

I was sitting at the table with Mr T and had both him and I in a flood of tears when the phone rang. It was Mrs O (a homeschool mom who had been home educating for around eight years) who asked me what was going on?  After listening politely to my woeful day, told me that if I was crying and he was crying I need to put away the reading / phonics books as he was not ready. After this I was to do some enjoyable learning together.  Gratefully I put the phone down, made some morning tea, snuggled up on the couch and read some great books together. We were in the middle of Core K from Sonlight. (As of 2011 it has been renamed: Core A)

While all this was most pleasant it did not remove this nagging feeling that somehow I was failing my son, who after all was already six years old and not reading.  It's one thing to have homeschool mom's saying: "It's alright it will happen when they are ready." but quite another to daily walk that road when it feels like your child is the only child not reading.

1001 Questions

Questions constantly plagued me:

• What was I doing wrong ?  
• Should I do this or should I be doing that ?
• Should I have started earlier?
• Do I need to be waiting and starting later ? 
• Maybe I need a different phonics program? 
• Which is the best phonics program? 
• Do I need to do phonics ?
• Why do I need to do this phonics ?
• Do I need a more intensive / less intensive program ?

Adding to the the burden were well meaning friends who were asking me how the reading was progressing ? Every where I went I found mother's (yes school Moms and home school Moms!) comparing their children's abilities to read.  All this did was add to my anxiety. I did not want to be exposing my failures to all these people, let alone expose my children to prying eyes. I was beginning to feel like I needed to go into hiding till my children could read.

Why is it that...

• When we are young and at school we compare ourselves to our peers and their ability to read.  
• When we become young people it never even crosses our minds to wonder how old the person in front of us was when they learned to read. 
• When we go for a job interview we are never asked how old we were when we learned to read ?
• When we are parents we start comparing our child's progress in learning to read with other parents.

It occurred to me that no one has ever asked me how old I was when I started reading, so why am I allowing every one to judge me now on my child's ability to read ? This was the question that helped me take firm hold of the fact that we had chosen to home educate to allow for the time it took for each of my children to learn any new skill with out the pressure to preform or measure up to someone else's expectations.

Now I do realize we need to have some 'standards' which come from comparison, otherwise how would we know when something is seriously wrong? Please note that I am not advocating never comparing, that is swinging the pendulum too far the other way. However I am talking about the comparisons we use which make us anxious and weary.

I have learned that the first factor starts with me and the attitude I have. This encompasses the motives I have for wanting my student to do a certain thing or do a certain thing within a certain time frame.

This process considerably eased my anxiety but not all of it.  I continued to search for answers to understand where we were on our journey.

I leave you with this question:

Why do we as home educators / parents compare our child against this unspoken rule that by the age of six our children should be reading ?

Other posts you might enjoy

• Factors influencing Learning to Read - Part 0.1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 2 
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 3
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 4
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 5

Teaching children to read .....

I started writing about my journey on this topic when after three hours I realized that I had written a very long essay ! So I have decided next week to do a 5 day series of posts called:

Some factors influencing learning to Read

This will not be about the different methods used to teach reading but rather about some of the factors that influence a students ability to learn to read.

I am looking forward to sharing my journey with you, the things that have shaped my philosophy about teaching children to read, and most importantly the things that have helped me relax and enjoy watching my students learn to read.

I am looking forward to hearing what you have all learned on your journeys in teaching reading to your students!

Other posts you might enjoy

• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 1
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 2 
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 3
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 4
• Factors influencing Learning to Read - part 5