DEAR READER, Pages under this menu item, At Home, are not yet completely revised and edited. But the information is sound, so it’s here to help those who are willing to overlook any typos or glitches. (I’m doing this as a volunteer project, so have very little help — and it’s a big undertaking.)
Welcome! I’m Janet Kierstead, and you’re in the section for parents, grandparents, caregivers — anyone helping a child learn at home. What you see here is a natural approach to learning that’s based on the realization that —
Children are natural mimics.
Nature sends them to us with the desire and ability
To absorb and copy
What they see and hear us doing —
If they’re interested in it.
You have already helped your child accomplish a multitude of complex behaviors in that way — including how to talk. And you can easily do the same with reading and writing. You just need to be a little more intentional about it.
Very briefly here, we using a concept called Key Words* — which are the words a child uses to tell you about something very important to them. In writing those words for them, you’re letting a child see how their own talk looks, written down.
With this, you’re modeling the act of writing — so they will begin to absorb and copy the skills involved. Over time, these skills then easily transfer to reading. So basically, you’re helping them learned to both read and write in the same gentle way you helped them learn to speak. And they do it with the same pleasure and ease.
You’ll learn how to do that in the section of this website, Write/Read Naturally!
On this section of the website, you’ll see some ideas for what else you can do at home.
But first — before you leave this page — I want to say a few things about helping a child learn at home.
Little Time Needed
First, the main activity — writing the child’s Key Word for them — takes about 15 minutes of your time each day. Then after they’ve finished the follow-up activity with their Key Word and are ready to show you their work, you need a few more minutes to admire what they’ve done, .
Second, if you’re a parent working at home — or your time is otherwise limited — you can introduce your child to the main activity yourself — then turn it over to someone else to do daily. (Or, of course, you can show this website to someone else and have them do the entire thing.)
That “someone else” might a grandparent, an older sibling, a babysitter — anyone who can print and spell correctly. For it’s really quite simple. If you do that, then I suggest you check in with them occasionally, to see how things are going.
Even spending such a brief time on this, it’s likely your child will make exceptionally good progress. For they’ll learn to both read and write, at the same time. And in my experience, it takes the child about the same amount of time it would take them just to learn to read — if they had skipped writing. For writings skills easily transfer to reading. And — everything they’ll be doing is based on their heartfelt interests. And interest is a powerful magnet for learning.
Finally, this activity can either supplement what your child is doing in school — or be at the heart of a comprehensive homeschooling program.
So, if your child needs to learn how to read/write, you can see how to do this naturally in Write/Read Naturally!
Then after that, especially if you’re homeschooling, you’ll find ideas of what else you can do to develop skills.
As many like to say, Homeschooling is NOT public school at home. So, one of the benefits of learning at home is that work can be personalized — based on the child’s skill level, the way they learn best, and their heartfelt interests.
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* Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who developed this concept, called these words the child’s Key Vocabulary and described them as the caption for a child’s mind pictures.
NEXT —> AT HOME: ORGANIZING LEARNING