Free Back to School Word Building Activity
Post by Contributing Writer Kim of Life Over C’s We are in full swing getting ready to head back to school! So I have been working on new activities for the kids to get their first week started off with…
The Tiny Seed: Literature-Based Activity Kit
*This is a sponsored post. I was compensated for sharing my honest opinions on this product. All opinions are 100% mine. Ivy Kids is a literature-based monthly subscription kit that comes packed with about a dozen ready-made activities based around…
Word Family Fishing
After our Word Family Snowball Toss activity, I was trying to think of a way to repurpose the ping pong balls and thought it would be fun to use them to fish! Learning word families (words with the same…
Word Family Snowball Toss
Word families can be a beneficial component in your teaching-your-child-to-read toolbox. To put it simply, word families are words that rhyme. Teaching children word families is a phonemic awareness activity that helps children see patterns in reading. This is…
Fizzy Reading
This is one of those activities that the boys and I LOVED and I am SO EXCITED to share with you! It is the perfect union of reading/decoding and science. And it was definitely a huge hit at our…
50% off the I Can Teach My Child to Read eBook!!!
Two years ago I wrote my first eBook, I Can Teach My Child to Read. It is the culmination of the years of experience as both a teacher and a parent. Big Brother had just started to read when I first launched…
Sight Word Target Practice
Hi! I’m Kristina from Toddler Approved and I am so excited to be guest posting today while Jenae takes care of her pregnant self and rests! Can’t wait to meet her cute little baby girl. Today I am going to…
Write and Stick a Sound
Guest Post by Becky of This Reading Mama My son {currently 4 years old} loves to “do school” at home. He asks for it quite often, which warms my heart! He’s also my child that likes to get…
Playdough & Alphabet Stamps
This was a serendipitous idea that came while the boys were playing with playdough today. As I watched them play with the cookie cutters, I grabbed our Melissa & Doug Alphabet Stamps (my favorite stamps ever) and encouraged a little…
Sight Word Dive
One of our favorite things about the summer is swimming. My parents have a pool and we live about 2 miles from a YMCA waterpark, so we are in the water a lot! Unfortunately, Little Brother has had some…
Summer of Reading
Make the summer of 2013 a summer of reading! Encourage your children to develop a life-long love of reading with these suggestions: 1. Read aloud to your child for at least 20 minutes each day. Â Even if your…
New Books!
Our local library is having their annual Scholastic Book Fair this week, so the boys and I picked up a few new books that were all so good, I just had to share! Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by…
Alphabet Parking Lot: Matching Capital and Lowercase Letters
One of the boys’ favorite things to play with is cars. They spend hours playing with their assortment of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. Little Brother used to be the only car lover, but he has now passed along his love…
Books for Brand New Readers
Finding books with engaging content for brand new readers is tough. If you regularly read high-quality picture books aloud to your child, she can easily become frustrated with the simple storylines in easy readers that she reads herself. But…
Consonant Digraph Garden
Part of learning to read is learning to recognize the various graphemes within a word. A grapheme is the visual representation of a phoneme (the smallest unit of sound). Although we stress learning individual letter sounds, we often forget…
Introducing Long Vowel Sounds with the What’s Your Name? E (free printable)
Once your child has learned letter sounds and can decode short consonant-vowel-consonant words, he/she might be ready to learn about the “What’s Your Name? E”. This special “e” occurs when it is split from another vowel with a consonant…
There’s a Wocket in My Pocket: Environmental Print with a Twist
Continuing our celebration of Dr. Seuss’s beloved books, we read There’s a Wocket in My Pocket yesterday and did a fun rhyming activity afterwards. Both of the boys were absolutely tickled with this activity and wanted to leave all the labels on…
I Can Teach My Child to Read eBook
I’ve been keeping a secret from you all for the last couple of months…I’ve been working tirelessly on a brand-new eBook titled I Can Teach My Child to Read:  A 10-Step Guide for Parents. I am so excited to announce…