Sparklebox.co.uk has some of them, but limited only to those taught as part of the U.K. letters and sounds program. This is some of what they have, also look into their playdough mats. http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/literacy/alphabet/activity-booklets/digraph-booklets.html#.UkTML8u9KSM

I save it for the next day. I can be reheated with a bit of water, or my boys will eat it cold.

Hahahah. I just realized I was being a very consumerist curriculum hoarder, and I need to live without AAS/AAR. :-P

Nevermind.

Exactly this!! The dress was nothing like I'd imagined, and it was the first one I tried on, at my mom's urging. We both knew it was it right away, though I tried on a few more for due diligence, only to return to it. ;)

So... this is a complicated question. There are those who say that all you need is Sam, and of course if that were all you had, it could totally be done. There is a super helpful Yahoo Group affiliated with 3rsplus.com, one of the publishers of the upper level Sam books. (The first two sets are in the public domain and can be found in various places online.) However, my five year old who now reads at a third grade level already had months of CVCing and even CVCC/CCVCing under his belt before we even started the Sam books. What the Sam books did for us as move us from sounding out to reading. Partly it is because of the super repetitive sounding out of the first few books. I can see how annoying they are, we have just started them with my three year-old. For what it's worth, I don't make him (the three year-old) read those first few books over and over. I only get into repeated readings as of book 10 or so, and even then we do twice. There are handy-dandy rewards/tracking charts available from both iseesam.com and 3rsplus.com. With my 3 year-old, I've done essentially Montessori Pink (CVC) level and some Montessori Blue (words like claps and skim and rent, as well as some of what might be called digraphs like sh and th) before we start. I do this through various forms of word work, be it on the iPad (apps like Reading Raven, Preschool University, Word Wizard and Writing Wizard, etc.) as well as some physical stuff involving cut and paste letters or words, and letter stamps. (He can't write lowercase letters yet, so we do our "spelling" word work by way of magnets, stamps, and cut and paste.) With #2, as with #1, the Sam words are those that he will be responsible for in the sense that, having decoded them frequently, they will need to be "sight"ish rather than S-a-m, Sam. I have also programmed lists of words from the Sam books into Word Wizard (movable alphabet spelling) and Writing Wizard (spelling by tracing letters), to provide him more practice with them outside of the readers. After we reach a certain level of the Sam books, I'll also start him on the You Can Read sight word program from 1+1+1=1, though I do it slowly and in such a way that the words are taught as "phonetic previews." For example, I've previewed "sh," and he's done "be, me, we" so that he can sound out "she." It doesn't need to be a sight word as such. The You Can Read program is just fun because it offers more opportunities for do-a-dot markers, cut and paste, puzzles, and coloring. I may very well wind up doing fewer of the activities with #2 than I did with #1, though. Part of the reason I do this is so that he can then also read the Nora Gaydos books, Bob books, and various other phonetic readers we have that incorporate more so-called sight words than the Sam books do. As for the Sam books themselves, say the sound, say the word is just about the only thing you need. Point to a letter or letter combination, ask "what sound?" The three first words are of course I, See, and Sam. I can see how this looks like sight reading, especially if you use something like readingteacher.com, which classifies see and I as "special words." See doesn't have to be a special word/sight word... just teach the ee vowel combination/phonogram right away! If you ask me, it's the ideal one to start with because it's the only one that is two of the same vowel and only makes one sound. (oo obviously presents more challenges.) It also just plain opens up a whole realm of words for the beginning reader that would otherwise have to wait until much later, and allows the readings to be a bit more fun. If you really do want to use the Sam books, I recommend joining the Yahoo Group called Beginning Reading Instruction. Lots of friendly people there who will help you along. :)

I just clicked "share public." Better?

So one person asked to be granted permission to view the folder, which I assume means it's not public. Argh. Photos got confused in the switchover from picasa to google plus. Let me look into it again.

My son's Kindergarten teacher has been sending home sheets that look like this: https://plus.google.com/photos/110454973130195142203/albums/5926680931107345985 The last two sheets are from a curriculum called Step by Step Stories that I downloaded a while back. It has a great idea, but doesn't follow through for more than three single letter phonograms. Still, the production value is a bit higher than our teacher-produced stuff. I find myself wondering how one could best go about creating a Spalding-style handwriting workbook. These are all good ideas. Do you have any others? What order do you introduce the letters/phonograms? How much practice / how many practice pages? I would love to have a resource like this, I find myself ordering things like HWOT or Kumon books because I want to have a preprinted thing, but I would prefer the Spalding method of handwriting, as that is what our boys will learn in school. Thoughts? The first few pages could be really large clock faces for finger tracing. There could be sheets to laminate for reusable practice.

Our governor (Arizona) just declared that we aren't really participating in the Common Core anymore. She issued an executive order changing the name to the "Arizona College and Career Ready Standards." Essentially, we will keep the standards and do their test in place of our former state test (AIMS) but not keep the name and the oversight (and presumably the money) so that it would not appear to be a federal takeover of Arizona education. Sigh.

My best recommendation are the I See Sam books. You can get the first to sets free online in various places, but having now gone through the more advanced sets, the first two are a somewhat poor indicator of what's to come. The "pace" picks up as you progress, and I love the way words are introduced. Pretty soon, you have a rich vocabulary without ever having to do drill sheets full of words, and there are real stories. One of my pet peeves of early reading instruction is the way "sight words" are taught/introduced. With my first I taught them as a sort of phonetic preview, or as rule breakers when they truly were, but in the context of the sound/text correspondence to which they were exceptions. The vast majority of so called sight words are totally phonetic. This even more than anything frustrates me. Why spend countless hours drilling "in," "mom," "like," or other such words... They are not "sight" words, just high frequency phonetic words... By virtue of their frequency, your child will decode them frequently in texts, so all this drill instantly recognizing the words is a pain in the derrière. If you teach a "rich" phonetic approach to the alphabetic code, many other words are no longer rule breakers. "To," "do," etc simply demonstrate one of the possible sounds associated with the letter o. If you teach a fake rule that says it may only "say" the short or long o, you create a false rule breaker where there is none. Anywho, all that to say: from the first book on such words are introduced naturally in the context of the English alphabetic code. "See" is not a sight word, it is /s/ and /ee/. And so on. As the teacher texts says, just say the sounds.

If this is something you're looking for, try Reading Bear online.

I had been very low carb paleo-ing... PHD gave me the freedom to reintroduce some rice and some potatoes into my diet, and I believe it is directly responsible for restoring my fertility. Love it.

Word Wizard is montessori based, meaning it has vowels and consonants in separate colors, but just functions as a movable alphabet. Montessori does teach some phonograms, usually in green, but this app doesn't cover that.

Uhm, wow. Just... Wow.

For what it's worth, of all phonemic awareness skills, rhyming was one of the least effective at predicting reading skill. Segmenting and blending words (orally) were the most critical skills. I honestly wouldn't worry too much about it. I think the emphasis of rhyming is a hangover from other programs teaching word families and such.

Reading some of these gift descriptions reminds me of my husband's office white elephant gift parties. The fact that they were given sincerely, not ironically... Well. :)

Only your third?! I am pregnant with my third, and I thought that in all but the most intense "you owe it to society/the environment not to do more than reproduce yourselves" circles three was still appropriate? Wow. I mean, we are done with this one, but that has more to do with my body and its issues with carrying ze bebes than anything else. For anyone to dare tell me what to do... Wow. Just wow.

To be fair, people peed indoors all the time... they just had to live with the, ahem, products for a while.

Right! I forgot that I was a breech C/S, too. Although I should note that being breech didn't necessarily mean you'd die. In fact, breech vaginal deliveries are being brought back in various countries because with the proper training, they can still be safer than Cesareans. ... oh, and I have to add my appendicitis to the list.

Allergic asthma caused, among other things, by animal dander. The worst offender? Horses. Try avoiding those prior to the 20th century! Two Cesareans which might not have killed me, but might have been still births instead. I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten. :) And of course, that doesn't count all the diseases we didn't get because we were vaccinated.

I've been reading through the teacher and student materials, especially for the Kindergarten level. Part of what I love is that it incorporates so many ideas from Diane McGuiness' book Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It, which I love. I've read it twice, and I have also read two of her more technical texts. I own Reading Reflex and even Diane's own program, Sound Steps to Reading. Neither of those two come close to what Core Knowledge has achieved, all the while working together with the Common Core standards ... which, like it or not, are probably here to stay. Working with them gives the program a passing chance at being implemented by school districts. I also really love the I See Sam books, which have a different progression in terms of introducing sound-letter correspondences, but if I am honest with myself I have to acknowledge that the short vowels/simple code first argument has too much support to be upended at this point. I'm not even sure I want it to be. A decided advantage to beginning with the CVC model is that there is such a wealth of support resources out there. (I'm thinking of games, printables, even iPad and iPhone apps.) All that being said, I've been trying to decide for some time now which free program I would use as the basis for some homeschool / afterschool printables and resources. I've gone back and forth between Blend Phonics, Word Mastery, and even the Reading Bear / Rudolph Flesch sequence, and I think I'm going to go with CKLA. Part of what I hope to achieve is to make it more friendly to the teacher/parent/tutor working with individual students, and perhaps also younger students such as my 3 year-old, who isn't ready for lower case writing but can do modified versions of the tasks with letter magnets and stamps. I know it's confusing and filled with Teacherese, but I encourage you to give it a try. You can preview/download individual components here http://www.engageny.org/resource/kindergarten-ela-skills-unit-1 Or register for free and get whole grades at a time here: http://www.coreknowledge.org/ckla-files

Making me feel better as I head into round three.... http://jezebel.com/how-to-lose-the-baby-weight-in-just-three-lightning-fas-5993518

As a Yalie, I would have to respectfully disagree. The biggest mistake here is equating recorded lectures with the quality of education. Most of our learning happened in seminars, or labs for the science folks. All lecture courses also have 2-3 hours of seminars per lecture hour, only some of which happened with TAs. (I had almost exclusive access to my professors, only in French did I have a TA.) Even in the seminars, the quality of my fellow students helped to ramp up the level of discussion. Some of my absolute favorite courses were mixed with undergraduates, grad students, law students, alumni, and even professors from other fields. Even the quality of our readings differed. I had a health issue one semester where I took off from Yale and lived with my parents, during which time I took a class at the college where my dad taught in New York. This was one of only two textbooks I used during my entire college career. (Once again, not counting French... But even there, my professor was the author of the textbook.) All the readings in my other courses were primary sources and "regular" trade books, or readers compiled for the course by the professor. Our library collections were second only to the Library of Congress and Harvard (grr), and as an undergraduate I had access to anything I wanted, even the rare books and manuscripts.

I am thirty weeks along, and the poor guy was jerking around like I was yelling at him. His older brothers are So. Lazy. Sometimes it seems like all they want to do is make messes and break things. No one listens to me unless I yell, and even then they only act if I hover and threaten punishment. Can't do this anymore. I'm getting to the point where I'm hoping for a third cesarean rather than a VBA2C because then I'll get to spend a few days in the hospital with just the tiny booger, and let the other two drive someone else (most likely my sister-in-law) insane. Sigh.