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'How to' with a 7 and 5 year old
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I am just now starting CM learning with my almost 7 year old son. We are beginning with Delightful Reading, and the other recommended resources. However, I have a little girl very eager to learn that is just turning 5 years old. She is begging to learn to read and wants me to ‘do school’ with her. I thought at first that she could just sit with us. However, she doesn’t want to just listen, but fully participate. I feel that I can’t fully concentrate on my 7 year old and maximize our ‘short lesson’ time. He also gets distracted if I start giving her instructions to do something different. It would also be difficult to work at the pace of both at the same time. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences, so would you mind sharing what worked for you. I really did not plan to start separate formal lessons with her, but I feel she is sad at the end of the day because I am really just engaging her older brother during our time together. Thoughts?
I might suggest that you consider something like Five in a Row to do with them both. Read the nice picture books with both of them, and then do activities with them that seem appropriate to their age. I did FIAR Vol 1 with my 5 and 6 year olds last year, and they both enjoyed the books and the activities.
My daughters were also much more eager learners than my sons. Give her quality learning time, too, even if it is in five minute increments throughout the day.
I know some might see hem as “busy work” but my kids love the R&S preschool and kinder workbooks. They are such traditional “cut, color and paste” that all my kids have enjoyed them.
Currently my 5-year old will spend about 15 min with me at the start of the day doing his “school” and he is so excited to have that one-on-one time with me he is happy to play quietly (sometimes not as quietly, LOL) alone while I read and do school with the big kids.
My first thought was to use something like Five in a Row. Spend about 20 minutes with her doing something special and she will be content the rest of the day, well at least the rest of the morning. Her love tank will be full. The lessons do not have to be formal. Share a good book and an activity: play with a ball or do action songs and rhymes together or make a craft, color, paint, etc. Mix it up. It is nice if she has something she can carry around with her that you made together. This will also help her with gross motor skills and fine motor skills as well as language development, which will be helpful when you do start more formal lessons with her.
When I taught my first born to read at age 5, his 3 yo sister tagged along at the table with us. I did not expect her to learn anything. But I gave her the same coloring page from letteroftheweek.com and she heard all of his lessons on letter sounds, etc. and she was present when I read all the books to him. And she picked up reading from just that. Yes, she was reading CVC words at age 3 without any formal lessons from me. Then at age 4, she wanted more books to read and she just kept learning from the leveled readers at her own pace.
I would do a few things together first. Some ideas would be to read from a picture book or chapter book, a children’s Bible reading, picture/composer/poet study, Laying Down the Rails for Children lesson, art project, memory work, etc. Pick a subject or two that she seems the most interested in.
I’ve noticed when I had multiple children in that age range, that the older one often got jealous that the younger one was doing something fun like putting together a puzzle or playing with math manipulatives. I usually let them do the same activity later on, after their lessons were done. This worked well for us.
My K’er does quite a few things during school time. My 6yo loves memorizing nursery rhymes, so I pick some shorter poems for her to memorize. We also love R&S preschool books. These have lots of cutting & pasting activities along with practicing letters, counting, etc. I think working on fine motor skills is a very important part of preschool through 1st grade. She also has some simple puzzles to work on. Math manipulatives like pattern blocks, geoboards, or just some legos are great too. Or just some art supplies to create with (crayons, clay, watercolors, etc.).
I don’t see anything wrong with a bit of phonics at this age either. They’ve all done ETC Primers or MCP K at age 4 or 5. Both books just work on letter sounds. The ETC Primers are great because they don’t have very much writing. MCP has a few writing assignments, but we just skip over these or they dictate a sentence to me. I like that this one is in color and comes with some colorful mini-books and letter flashcards. If phonics isn’t going well, you can always set it aside for a bit and try again in a few months.
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