Parenting Under the Stars

Reading books to children is important even when they are infants. Even if they flap their arms around and occasionally look away and/or chew on the book, it is good to start them early. We had many cardboard books with corners chewed on them.

My parents were wonderful with us and made reading fun. My mom always had such excitement in her voice when she read and my dad the artist would draw silly pictures with words to help us identify them.

There are a couple different methods that schools use to teach kids to read but this whole language approach seems to be used more than before. People who push the whole word method maintain learning to talk and write are the same but I don’t think so.

I am more of a phonics fan since that is how we learned, taught our children and it was effective. Maybe learning the whole word seems easier initially, but for a long-term method, it’s lacking. If you learn from the start how to sound out words, your reading vocabulary can advance faster.

We were discussing our favorite books over at Mom is Teaching. I like the classic Dr.Seuss books, Robert Munsch, Bernstein Bears and Little Critters. Little Critters and Bernstein Bears always had a lesson or moral to the story while still keeping it fun for kids. One of my kids favorites was “Love you Forever” by Robert Munsch. I would sing it for them too, which was fun. My husband is a musician also, so we often mix music with learning. Certain children learn better if they can get up and move instead of sitting quietly. One of our daughters is like that.

Ron Clark, the famous rapping teacher has the idea with mixing music with learning. He makes up rap lyrics to popular songs to help children learn. Oprah is a big fan of Ron Clark and his teaching methods, as you can see on these Oprah show clips.