It's that time where we start seeing the workbooks pulled out for summer, the ever pressing summer reading list, the stack of math packets that might come home with your kiddo as they are heading into summer break. 

While it's important to keep kids thinking and learning during the summer, there are so many more aspects that are equally as important. 

As technology starts to become more and more prominent in our lives, it's becoming more crucial to focus on our soft skills. On our people skills, the ones that we utilize every day and will need to continue to develop in order to become successful humans. 

Anything that truly resonated with you? 

Send me a DM on IG @intentionaleducationpodcast

I would truly love to hear from you!

Course correcting your child's current education journey is never an easy decision. If you are reflecting on this past year and have ultimately decided that you are not in love with where your child is attending school then you are in the right episode!

There are 3 main questions to ask while reflecting and trying to decide where you want to go from here in your child's journey:

1. What exactly were you disappointed with in this school year?
2. What kind of learner is your child?
3. Where is there friction between your family values & their current schooling process?

While your current school options may not always meet 100% of your needs, there are some really cool options out there that go against the grain of traditional schooling and better meet the needs of your child. 

As always, if you are struggling with what your options are, what options would be best to meet the needs of your family, I am here to help! You can find me over on IG @intentionaleducationpodcast. 

Kids will start showing an interest in independently reading at varying stages of their development and for some kids they start as early as age 3 while others may not show an interest until later on in their development (8 or 9).

There's nothing wrong with this despite what we may see in mainstream common core standards and social media.

Some kids are simply more interested in gross motor activities, creating art, music, whatever it may be, but eventually they will start peaking an interest and when they are ready you will already have some simple strategies to be able to use with them.

Also the very best thing that you can do if your child isn't showing interest, is keep introducing it with no strings attached, the more you try and push a kiddo who isn't interested, the more they are just going to hate reading in general.

Whenever we are learning anything new, this can be for us as adults, kids, any human what we are actually doing is strengthening the neurons in our brain to create pathways that will reinforce what we know and what we are learning.

Which is why if you can ever tie a new skill into something that your kiddo already knows, this can be a great way to not only reinforce previous knowledge but also make it faster to incorporate new knowledge.

When kiddos are starting to read, I always break this down into 2 sets of categories.

One category being words that can be sounded out phonetically like cat /c/ /a/ /t/ cat.

The other category are words that don't generally follow a phonemic pattern and words that we simply have to memorize or memorize its pattern. For example- the word you, phonetically it is not prononuced by seperating each letter so these are words that we need to keep practicing aka memorizing until that neural pathway is strong enough that we can instantly recognize it.

These are most commonly known as sight words, and there are so many sight word lists out there that you can find online. There isn't one that's better than another in my opinion, my advice here would be to pick one list and stick with it.

Sight Word lists: 

Fry Sight Words

Dolch Sight Words

Multiple ways to incorporate this into your everyday:

Do a word search around the house, in the books you have in the house

Use flashcards and place them around the house and have them go on a word hunt

Write a sentence they can read on a piece of paper and have them draw a picture of the sentence. 

Make it fun! Reading doesn't have to be done in a vacuum. Incorporate it into as many different activities as you can so that you can building the connection in their brain and strengthening their confidence along with it.

I hope this helps give you a starting point to introduce reading. It doesn't have to be scary or overwhelming I promise!

Let me know what you thought of this week's episode @intentionaleducationpodcast.