Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

  
If you use, or are interested in using Hooked on Phonics then I’ve written about its effectiveness on several occasions.  You can check them out here (How I Homeschool, Anybody Can do it With Hooked on Phonics!, Hooked on Phonics Products (video), Reading Progress: 5 year old Alan, Hooked on Phonics: Master Reader (with videos),  Hooked on Phonics: Retooled Experience, Hooked on Phonics Update).  But today, as my youngest son is nearing the end of his Hooked on Phonics: Master Reader adventure, I reflected on how[…]

         
I started learning how to be a homeschooling parent the day I gave the boys their first school lessons.  But, even after that first lesson it took months to create a working curriculum.  I was clueless about how much time I should spend per day teaching, on which subjects to concentrate first and, most importantly, how to stay within the law.  Before we started I had never known another parent who homeschooled their kids, and I didn’t know where to turn for answers.  However, I don’t[…]

      
The boys, and I, have begun learning calligraphy, and a few weeks ago I went on an expedition for teaching materials.  I thought they would be easy to find – but I was wrong.  I did find a handwriting workbook at Barnes & Noble which, for lack of a better solution, we immediately started using.  However, my suspicion was that it lacks incremental technique building exercises, that it is deficient in fundamental motor skill exercises.  I was right.  It became immediately clear the boys needed to[…]

  
Some of you may have read what I said last week about administering reading comprehension quizzes to my oldest boy after he reads certain books.  So far that’s worked out pretty well.  However, while he’s able to give me correct answers, I wonder what goes through his head when he reads about, for example, ancient Rome.  Little kids don’t have a developed sense of historical events.  They can’t imagine a world that doesn’t, for example, have iPods, Nintendo and televisions.  They also don’t know how to[…]

Quality on-line resources are slowly making libraries obsolete.  Don’t worry though.  It won’t happen anytime soon; libraries are still a far superior option.  The internet, or course, hasn’t always been so useful.  Sure, it’s been good for buying things and connecting with friends; but finding reliable scholarly information has always been a stumbling block for online information exchange.  After all, sharing information might seem like a great idea, but it doesn’t do much good if all the information being passed back and forth is unreliable garbage.  So,[…]

The first step in a child’s journey to literacy is to make the basic letter sounds.  Later they shape sounds into words and sentences.  We’ve been through all of that, struggle and reward, and we’re proud that that portion of our journey is over.  Neil, now 7, is ready to open the next gate and start learning how to retain information.  The need to embark on the next leg of our reading adventure became obvious when I had him read a Magic Tree House book about Pompeii.  I[…]

  
The most I’ve taught my kids about weather so far is that the temperature changes depending on the seasons and that they should stay away from lightning.  They’re old enough now though that perhaps it’s time to start teaching them more comprehensively about the weather: Layers of atmosphere, how clouds and hurricanes and tornadoes form, barometric pressure, weather fronts, El Niño and La Niña … .  Meteorology is pretty complicated when you get down to it; it’s hard to know where to start.  Thankfully, we all[…]

   
I took a full, practice citizenship test in 2002 when Mely was studying for hers.  I thought, “I better be able to pass this if I expect Mely to do it.”  I scored exactly 90% (I forgot what Mely scored on the actual test, but it was a solid pass).  Certainly a 90% is not perfect, and I could improve, but my score is apparently much better than the rest of the country.  42% of Oklahoma high school graduates cannot pass the US citizenship basic knowledge test[…]

 
Movies are powerfully influential on young minds (reference Joseph Goebbels).  Thus, it might surprise you, knowing what we do about movies playing loose with historical facts, that teachers, history teachers no less, are using them in the classroom to help teach history.  But, it’s not as bad as you might think.  Some teachers believe that by showing popular, historically based movies to their kids that the kids will gain a more vivid appreciation for the history they learn in textbooks (which frequently conflict with the movie[…]

  
An interesting thing happened when I taught my kids how to gamble – they loved it.  For those of you who don’t know how to play 5 Card Brag, it’s quite simple.  You deal 5 cards and each player discards the two they don’t like.  The object is to make a prial (3 of a kind), a running flush (3, 4, 5 of the same suit for instance), a run, flush, pair or just a high card in the absence of anything else.  Everybody throws in a[…]