Helpful Tips on How to Teach Your Child to Read

 

 

Helpful Tips on How to Teach Your Child to Read

Teaching your child to read can be quite the daunting and overwhelming task. You may ask yourself, When do I start, or Where do I begin? These are questions that we often get at Little House.  Some eager children are ready to begin learning their letter sounds as early as 2 or 3, others simply aren’t ready until 4 or even 5. Either way don’t panic! Your child will eventually sore and will be reading classics such as Harry Potter or Field of Dreams in no time. When you believe your child is ready to dive into the world of literature there are some key tips to stick to in order to make the process as pleasurable as possible for you and your child.

First, it’s important to introduce manageable stories for your child to read. Setting an impossible goal for your child will only make him or her frustrated and less inclined to want to read. By this I mean choose stories that are very phonetic and have few sight words. Sight words are words that are meant to be memorized because they cannot be sounded out. An example of such is was. If you were to sound out this sight word you would spell wuz. For someone beginning to read, too many of these words is frustrating.  Second, only introduce stories that have sounds that your child has been taught. If your child only knows the letters sounds don’t suggest stories that have advanced sounds or rules such as Magic E or Vowel teams.

At Little House we almost always use the Primary Phonics series when beginning to read. This series starts out with only 3 letter short vowel words and slowly introduces higher level sounds. Explode the Code is another great series or workbook that helps students who are learning to read that also incorporate spelling and reading comprehension. Finally, choosing stories that are aimed towards your child’s interests will definitely help to get your child excited for reading which is the ultimate goal!

By: Jordan Richards

Little House Academy/ Learning with Animals

Learning with Animals

This year, Little House Academy got to participate in a weekly trip to Southlands to visit a new friend named Patou. Patou is a gentle giant – a twenty year old thoroughbred who loves kids almost as much as carrots!

The students learned a bit of everything to do with horse care, from brushing and feeding, to telling a horse’s age by their teeth, how to muck out a stall, led a horse, scrub out water buckets, bathe a horse when it’s nice and warm out, and most importantly how to be calm and confident around an animal that can be quite nervous at times. They learned about the responsibility that comes along with caring for animals, and were able to spend time outside smelling sweet hay on the breeze.

We would brush and walk Patou each week and let him snack on grass along the way. The students did a great job and their confidence grew whether in picking out horse’s feet, brushing them, or feeding them treats. Animals truly are one of the best teachers we are lucky to work with. They teach us how to be adaptable and how to communicate in different ways. They remind us to be gentle yet confident in ourselves, and to respect others and ourselves. Hopefully our time with Patou helped the students with all of these lessons and made them feel happy along the way. He will miss all of the love and attention from the wonderful students of Little House.

-Carly 🙂

What Little House Means to Me! Winner

Creative writing is writing that expresses the writer’s thoughts and emotions in an imaginative, often poetic and unique way. It is a way for us to expose a personal aspect of ourselves out there for the world to read, analyze and react to.

At Little House, we understand the importance of developing creative writing skills in children and ensure our students are getting plenty of exposure to this creative process. This spring term, students at Little House took part in a writing competition  titled “What Little House Means to Me” and we are proud to announce the winner, Miss Ann Enxin Wang. Ann is only in grade 2 at Jules Quesnel and started coming to Little House during the Fall 2015 term for some additional support in written and spoken output in English. Her English-speaking, reading and writing abilities have taken a leap in the course of the past year – she is now well equipped in writing wonderfully detailed paragraphs, narrative stories, reports and informative essays; she is incorporating newly learned vocabularies to her speaking.

Ann was also one of the very few to be selected by the prestigious West Point Grey school for the upcoming school year. Congratulations are in order!

-Preenan