Reading and Writing

After all these years and all these students, I finally feel like I have a system. So here, to remind myself of the system again in two years when Kyrie is in kindergarten, I'll list:

My favorite tools for teaching a kindergartner how to write:

• Magnetic doodle toy. Kids go through so many pieces of paper trying to get their Os round and their Bs and Ds facing the right directions. But paper is work! Magnetic doodle toys are fun, and they'll doodle Os and Bs and Ds over and over if only they get to slide-erase after.
  
• Box of fine sand. Because it is so tactile to draw a new letter in the sand and see the blue shape of letter emerge! Kudos to my eldest sister Sherri for this idea—she passed along the perfectly-sized box with waxy blue paper already glued to the bottom and said, "Fill it with sugar! Or something! And then they can draw!" We used a fine red sand and it makes all the difference in helping kiddles connect with the letter they're learning.

My favorite tool for teaching a second grader those tricky spellings of English:

• Magnetic letters. We have a magnetic white board here in the school room that functions like a classroom chalkboard. Whenever Jackson encounters, in his reading, those tricky combinations like ight and eigh and even easier ones like oy or ay or ie, we can put the core letters on the magnet board and then with a FUN! swish and a swipe we can make all kinds of words out of it right then as he's reading. So he gets ow and brown and cow and wow and how and howdy (...etc.) all at once and it is so much easier to remember the construction and the sound.

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