Read & Write

Author Websites We Love

Whenever we fall in love with a book (or a series), I like to see if the author or illustrator has a kid-friendly website. The girls love learning about an author’s childhood and playing games featuring their favorite book characters. Here are a few sites we frequent, as well as new ones we are getting [...]

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Our Favorite Board Books

Wanna take a trip down memory lane with me? During the long (and apparently never-ending) unpacking process at our new house, I came across a bin of board books that I had saved. Even though my girls have mostly outgrown these little treasures, I couldn’t bear to part with our favorite board books. These books [...]

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Interesting Books for Beginning Readers

We have been doing lots and lots of reading this summer. I’m reading aloud to the girls as usual, but now they are both reading on their own, too. So exciting! Delaney is a beginning reader – she can “sound-out” many words, she knows about 25 sight words, and she is good at using picture [...]

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Our Summer List

Are you ready for summer?  It’s another unusually chilly morning here, but supposedly summer is on its way.  This Friday is our “official” last day of homeschool and then it’s Hello, Summer Vacation!  Our Summer List was such fun last year that we’ll be making another one this year – how about you? {Originally posted [...]

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Spring Audio Books for Kids

We love listening to audio books, especially in the car. Luckily, our library has a pretty good selection of picture book/CD sets and audio chapter books. I also like purchasing audio stories and making themed audio story playlists for the girls. We can listen to them on our iPod or burn a CD for the [...]

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Family Mail

{Originally posted November 2009 at Early Bird Homeschool} I like to provide my girls with lots of “real-life” writing opportunities – helping with the grocery list, writing letters, making signs, etc.  They draw pictures, scribble-write, use invented/phonetic spelling, or copy words from a variety of sources.  I have been wanting to set-up a family mail [...]

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Welcome, Spring!

Happy First Day of Spring! We are working in the garden this weekend – transplanting some seedlings that have been hanging out in my garden window, building some trellises, and just enjoying the spring weather.  I hope you are all finding a bit of spring where you live, too! I’m also sharing one of our [...]

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Rainbow Poems

We have been having a crazy mix of rain and sun (and hail!) – just the perfect weather for rainbow-hunting!  With rainbows on our mind, I gave the girls this simple rainbow poem coloring sheet: Natalie decided to make her poem about rainbow-colored fruit, and Delaney was using Lois Ehlert’s Planting a Rainbow for rainbow [...]

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Make a Leprechaun’s Walk Book

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My girls have been looking ahead on their calendars to find the next holiday – guess it’s time to pull out some St. Patrick’s Day activities! In the deep, dark archives of my teaching days I found this fun fill-in-the-blank book that you can make with your child, along with a happy little leprechaun to [...]

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The Anderson Courier

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The first edition of The Anderson Courier is just hitting the newsstand, courtesy of our very own news reporter, Natalie! Natalie has been hard at work writing and illustrating her first newspaper with articles, interviews, jokes, movie review, recipe, and more. After reading Some Good News (the 4th book in the Cobble Street Cousins series [...]

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