Making It Up

as we go along

Reading eggs

Getting back into the (home education) groove.

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It feels like absolutely ages since it’s been anything resembling normal here, and for once that’s not just a feeling. We went to Christmas camp in the second week of December, and since then, there hasn’t been a day when the whole family has been well. Honestly, it’s been weeks of misery and illness, and it means there is no pattern to the days. As the younger members of the family are the healthiest, this has started to let boredom set in, along with mischief, so this week, despite feeling like really I’d still like to be spending all day in bed, I’ve pushed for what used to be called normals around the blogring.

Normals, for us, are a bit of maths, bit of reading/ English, maybe some history or science or coding. For the younger children, some art, drawing, sticking, whatever, and educational apps, along with read alouds.

Picture books obviously get plenty of attention 😉 Today during the day we read My Big Shouting Day (which I’m hoping is mentioned in that post, or that’s just a miscellaneous link 😉 ) and then at bedtime there was the Gruffalo’s Child. (I do love that book.) Smallest did some drawing – mainly of birds, and lots of playing on minecraft. She’s made a developmental leap there, and suddenly instead of sitting with Small giving him direction, she’s able to build and do things for herself. She caught? found? a dog, but made it grow too big and it died. And instead of sitting and crying, she went out and found another. Then she wanted to name it, but sadly technical support had gone out to the library with Big, so she was left with me.

And I know next to nothing about playing minecraft. I know a bit about installing it and modding it, because we’ve done that before, but I’ve never played it. So we struggled with it for a while, and I even put out a desperate plea for help on twitter, but failed to sort it out.

We were picking the nametag up from the wrong place. Obviously.

I suspect that Smallest is going to learn to read and plan and type now, because she’s motivated to continue to do more and more on minecraft. I’m going to have to buy her her own very soon – they spent tonight building her a skin? (No, still no idea.)

In and around this, she also did some reading and maths (Reading Eggs and mathseeds) and fought with Tigerboy over his new Glockenspiel. Which was nice.

Small has restarted maths after a bit of a break. He’d reached the end of the year 9 work, and I took a look the other day to see what if anything, mathletics offered next. There’s an IGCSE course, but there’s also year 9 extension work, so he got going on that. Surds. Indirect variance. All sorts of things that were hurting to my head, but we got there, and he’s powering his way through again. I think it might make my life easier in some ways (though harder in others) if he and Big sat maths together next summer, so we’ll gradually work towards that.

Big picked up her maths book again, and we’re working towards GCSE. Or IGCSE, whichever we find a centre for. And tomorrow she’s picking up the other text books too. This is absolutely her choice, and I will do whatever I can to facilitate it.

I need to look into slightly more formal art – I’m looking forward to seeing the Toucan Box art awards stuff at some point, which I think will be ideal for Smallest and Small. It would be nice to get Big maybe an art club or art lessons, need to explore opportunities there. And Tigerboy is frighteningly capable at almost reading – he was doing the Bob books app on the iPad mini yesterday and when you suggest what sound he should be looking for, he can find it, although he just stabs madly otherwise.

He’s a little learning machine basically, this morning he was experimenting with truth and falsehood. He was trying to persuade me he needed milk, and I said that we usually do that for going to sleep, or if he hurts himself. OK, he said, and trotted off. Then came back, moments later, claiming he’d bumped his head on the kitchen floor and needed milk desperately.

Yes, well. He hadn’t, and readily admitted that he hadn’t when I asked him. Funny little boy.

And that’s been the last couple of days. Plenty of learning facilitated all over the place, plenty of playing and family too.

How to use Reading Eggs to help your child learn to read.

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At the weekend, I posted a picture that I’m incredibly proud of, so I’m going to take this opportunity to share it again.

Smallest reading her first book

This is Smallest. She’s 5 in November. She hasn’t started school – we home educate. And she’s reading her first book.

We don’t do school at home. No formal sit down lessons. We have lots of resources round and about, but I’m a child led home educator, I pick up on the children’s interests and I do a fair bit of accidental strewing. So we’ve got Bob books, and Songbird phonics (thank you the book people!), more picture books than you can shake a stick at, and of course, computers, tablets and various reading technologies. More on those tomorrow.

Today though, I’m talking about Reading Eggs and how it’s fitted in to our learn to read journey mark 3.

Smallest plays on Reading Eggs most days. To begin with she needed some help finding her way around, or understanding what to do on the various activities. That just meant that I sat with her and did the clicking, until she could do it for herself. And when she eventually completed the first section and did the test on it, it recommended she start over. This was the turning point theough, as she discovered all the games she could play with the golden eggs she was accumulating, and at that point, there was no holding her back 😉

She’s romping through it now, and she rarely needs any help. She loves seeing what pets she gets as she moves through the lesson maps – there are plenty of incentives for children to keep playing. She often has a small assistant – Tigerboy loves to sit alongside and watch. And the other morning, as she was saying words, he was repeating them, so I’m giving Reading Eggs credit for enhancing his speech as well 🙂 I’m fairly sure that is why he recognises so many letters.

Sometimes Smallest gets a little confused between the names of letters and the sounds they make, and plumps for the names first. It surprised me a little to begin with that Reading Eggs does names and sounds together, but then I remembered that there are upper case letters in Montessori classrooms too, and while the focus is on sounds, both bits are taught pretty much at the same time. She’s certainly got the hang of sounds and names anyway, enough to be sounding out phonics books, without any reading lessons from me.

I remember teaching Big to read. It wasn’t pretty. It took a very long time, and I vowed I was never going there again. I was really pleased when Small used the Montessori materials at school to figure it all out for himself. I was kind of thinking that I would start something semi-formal, and probably Montessori based, with Smallest in September, knowing that most people would expect her to be in school then, but now I’m thinking I’m just going to keep on going the way we’re going, with plenty of reading aloud to her, letting her read the books she’s interested in, and allowing lots of time on Reading Eggs and other favourite game sites. (Cbeebies. She likes Cbeebies mostly.)

If you’d like to look into it, clicking the banner above should take you over to the site where you can sign up for a free trial. It’s a bit of a pain to navigate your way in from the front page to where you actually play the game – there doesn’t seem to just be a play now button as such, but once the child is at their bit, they don’t seem to have a problem with it.

You don’t have to be a home educator to use Reading Eggs by the way. If your child is at or is going to go to school, it will support what they’re doing, and stand them in excellent stead in the classroom. You’re not quite sure how the whole phonics thing works and worried you’ll get it wrong? Reading Eggs has it covered for you, supporting the development of sounds with games, so you can focus on reading fun books, which I maintain is at least half of the battle. If you’re wanting something to keep your children in touch with their education during the summer, without making it into a battle, you could do a lot worse than check it out.

Disclosure: links are affiliate links. I have paid for and used extensively the products I am recommending above. That’s what gives me the confidence to recommend them as part of their affiliate program.