Education

"Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls." Matthew 11:29

The Basic Beginnings

Antonio and Carmen are in school. Here are some of the methods we've used to teach them English. Felix gets to play or color while the older two study.

We started off trying to build a basic vocabulary with them, teaching them through pictures and some songs. We gather magazines from our library's recycling bin, to tear out pictures that begin with the letter of the day. At first, Krista would cut them out for them, and group them by the letter of the day, but they weren't quite catching on. So she backtracked a little more, working on the basics of the alphabet, writing the letters out, and learning the ABC song. We got a really good Sesame Street DVD that put the alphabet to several tunes, that they liked a lot.

Other than memorizing the alphabet, we also started right away with memorizing Psalm 23, and weekly passages from Patch club.

Something Krista found very helpful for the getting-going stage was a teacher's manual by Sonlight, a company that produces Christian curriculum heavily literature based - excellent for teaching English. 

Reading and Writing

We continued the writing process, trying to get them to recognize words as a whole. They copied their patch verses, and Krista also started picking out a Bible verse for each letter of the alphabet. We also memorized these verses, in both Spanish and English.

We started reading to them early on, both during the day, and at night before bed. Krista found several great children's books. We started with Dr. Seuss - level reading, and moved right on into "regular" children's stories. They definitely don't understand everything, but they understand a surprising amount! Chicka-chicka boom-boom is one of the favorites. That's in a great new book called The 20th-Century Children's Book Treasury. We also read The Children's Book of Virtues, a bilingual fairy-tale collection, and a first 100 words in Spanish book with great illustrations. 

Phonics

At a local homeschool store, Krista purchased a phonics package called Sing, Spell, Read, & Write that includes games, tapes, CDs, cutting, coloring, prizes, and lots more. They know the alphabet by now, so now they're moving past the song into knowing each letter and what it sounds like. It's funny, because they mispronounce things, but then correctly identify the letter they started with. For instance, they'll say "gwhat - g, g!" or "eschool - eh, eh!" Other Spanish pronunciations confuse them: the v sounds like b, the z sounds like s, and the y often sounds like j.

November 2000