The Gift Of Reading & Literacy

Our daughter home-schools her 4 children. I am very blessed and thankful she is able to do so. I home-schooled our children and if given the opportunity to raise my children all over again I would most definitely home-school them!No hesitation there for me...I am so thankful my husband worked 2 jobs so I could stay home with my children. I cannot even begin to proclaim the joys of being able to teach them and be with them , and I cherish that time with them to this day. "To teach is to learn twice." Joseph Joubert, "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance." L.B. Johnson "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Richard Steele Our daughter has given me the privilege of teaching her youngest daughter MN to read.MN's older brother and sister took to reading pretty much as easily as her Mom and I did but MN is needing a little extra here. She is still pretty young , has plenty of time to learn to read and she gets lessons from her Mom, but every Tuesday she comes over to spend the day with me as we work together to understand the mystery of letters and words, and open that big book of adventure, discovery, and wonder called 'reading'. We have alphabet cookie cutters,play-dough, her first readers, paper, pencils and stickers for rewards. I am hoping that for her to handle play-dough and find the right letter cutters, cut them out and form them tangibly into letters will help her connect the letters in her mind to letters and words on paper. She is having FUN, FUN, FUN doing this. ( so am I) " There are so many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is (one of ) the best of all."Jacqueline Kennedy She spent last night with us , and after a day of fun with Grandma, which included reading lessons, she grabbed her favorite book and her blanket and baby doll ( notice how she placed her baby in Poppa's lap) for her Poppa to read this book to her. She just loves books about babies. So Poppa read this book to her, and she had him read it to her again. She also borrowed it to take home and read again. She was so cute, she just snuggled up to Poppa and seemed to emanate pure joy as she held her favorite blanket and read with Poppa."Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read." M.J. Adams "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."Emilie Buchwald MN loves all these books and I am so glad I have saved them. She took some of these books to bed here( we were blessed by her being able to spend the night here with us), I always give my grandchildren a little flash-light to take to bed, so MN read books by flash-light. "There is more treasure in books than in all the loot on Treasure Island." Walt Disney I do not remember ever NOT being able to read, reading comes easy to me and I know I taught myself to read. My daughter taught herself to read by the time she was 4 years old. However, our sons took a bit longer. I am glad I home-schooled them because I was able to teach them how to read in a way that worked for each of them individually. "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury When I was in high school I had too many credits for the school I transferred into from another state, so I was given elective credits for tutoring a junior high boy in reading. He had spent many of his school years in special reading classes and when I had him read to me, well, he couldn't. He could NOT read at all.How did he get so far in school with the inability to read? So I began to teach him how to read using phonics, and do you know, by the end of the quarter he could read. HE COULD READ!!!! When he read aloud to me a page of our lesson I was so happy for him. A few weeks later I got a hand-written letter from him thanking me for teaching him how to read, and he taught me the blessing and joy of teaching something I do not think anyone should be without~ the ability to read. "No skill is more crucial to the future of a child, or to a democratic and prosperous society, than literacy." L.A. Times

"The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who can't read." Mark Twain

"It is not enough to simply teach children to read, we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations---something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own." K. Patterson

"We read to know we are not alone." C.S. Lewis "A man is known by the books he reads." Ralph Waldo Emerson