Looking to boost your child’s reading comprehension skills at home? This guide, compiled by a Reading Specialist, offers practical resources for your homeschool.

Looking for a way to add written phonics practice to All About Reading? We use Explode the Code workbooks to reinforce phonics concepts and provide written practice with All About Reading.

Thinking about homeschooling your four-year-old? Good news—you don’t need a rigid schedule or a stack of workbooks to make it work! PreK is all about play, exploration, and learning through everyday moments. In this post, I’ll share simple, stress-free ways to prepare your child for kindergarten as well as some of my favorite resources.

How can we add grammar alongside All About Reading without overwhelming our kids or ourselves? My mantra for kindergarten and first grade “grammar” is keep it short and simple. In order to do this, I used an oral grammar program for my kindergarten through second graders and then move to a more independent program in third grade.

Looking for curriculum for kindergarten? Let me give you a few ideas with the resources I used for my oldest child in Kindergarten.

What do the letters say? Here’s how to teach the basic alphabet sounds. We’ve included a list from A to Z with recommended sounds to focus on for each letter along with specific words to use as examples.

After using All About Reading (AAR) for several years, I have picked up a few tips that I hope might help someone else just starting out….Check the front of each workbook…Prep the student workbook…Make the fluency review fun…

I am a huge fan of the All About Reading (AAR) series from All About Learning Press.…Many parents online mention that AAR is not a complete Language Arts curriculum. And, I agree. It is predominantly a PHONICS curriculum -- and in my opinion, an excellent one. But, in order to round out our kids' education, most parents want to include a few other components to this…here are my recommendations...

If you are looking for a podcast to help fill some hours of washing dishes, doing laundry, while encouraging you in your homeschool endeavors, check out this fantastic resource. Bex has so many episode interviews full of amazing resources, suggestions, and research.

How I set it up to REUSE all the materials with each kid…I pre-assemble the activities in a large 3-ring binder before we ever start the next level - The student book that comes with each level has lots of hands-on manipulative games to reinforce the concepts being taught throughout the book. I hate collecting and assembling lesson pieces on a daily (or even weekly) basis. I would much rather have a huge “project” where I gather everything for the whole year at once, spend several hours, and get it all done. Then when we are in the middle of a busy homeschool day, I can just grab it and start teaching.

All About Reading, the brain-child of Marie Rippel came about as she struggled to help her dyslexic son learn to read. Hers is a phonics-centered (Orton-Gillingham based) curriculum for early elementary students. All About Reading (AAR) includes four levels as well as a Pre-Reading curriculum. At the time of this writing, I am part-way through level three with my oldest and feel like I can finally say IT WORKS with some authority. Check out the All About Learning Press website here.

In Dr. Ruth Beechick’s book, “The Three R’s,” she lays out a very gentle, or “natural” learning method. It has helped me to continue breaking from the mold of the classroom teacher I was used to into a more flexible and child-centered approach for my homeschooling.

Do you have a kid who struggles to read on their grade level? Desperate to help them but unable to hire a tutor?…Try assisted reading!! As a parent working one-on-one with your child, you have an incredible opportunity to apply this strategy. It has been called “arguably one of the easiest and most cost-effective methods of developing children's fluency” [1].

Rather than waiting until children struggle, every child should receive systematic phonics instruction from the start. This is why I chose a dyslexic curriculum for my neurotypical child. Moving beyond the whole language approach, phonics focuses on understanding the sounds and rules of English. In this article, I explain the differences between these approaches, share my teaching experiences, and recommend valuable resources for effective reading instruction.

Soggy little pieces of cardboard mush lay waste around my daughter’s crib as I reach in to pick her up. The remnants of her naptime snack lies in shreds between blankets, pacis, and stuffed animals. No I don’t let my babies eat in their crib. They just often decide that a book would be a nice treat.