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Valentine’s Day! ♥
Usually, the focus of my posts is on Ireland. However, my children and I really enjoyed this ♥ Valentine’s Day ♥ mini study from Brighter Day Press, we were able to get many of the listed enrichment books in our local library, which is unusual, and the snacks were all delicious, enjoyed by all and easily dairy- and gluten-free! Plus it’s a pdf so easily accessible in Ireland. I wanted to share the fun with you… You could make it more Irish by heading off to the Shrine of St. Valentine in the heart of Dublin city, at Whitefriar Street Church! ☘ This is a week long study of the…
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Learning Handwriting using Handwriting Without Tears
Both my children loved learning to write using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. I think this is a fantastic curriculum for learning print handwriting, and it is available here in Ireland from Sensational Kids in Naas and Thinking Toys in Co. Clare. The aim of the program is for children to learn to write legibly and quickly. It is used by many home educators right from the start, and it is also used remedially with older children both by parents and by occupational therapists. With home educating we have the significant advantage of being able to teach at our child’s pace and to teach for mastery. Some curricula tie reading…
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Do I need to teach sentence diagramming in Ireland?
When I was investigating US writing curricula, I found that some of them include a lot of sentence diagramming, starting around 4th grade or so. I had never heard of sentence diagramming, never mind done any myself in school. I asked around and was told that three moms with older children had just crossed out those exercises in their writing/language arts curriculum. I am fine with crossing out something that isn’t useful for us to do (I’m not going to get my children to do busywork) but first I wanted to know why it was there, and how it might affect things later. What is sentence diagramming? Sentence diagramming, also…
