Saturday, January 4, 2020

Homework hack for parents of new readers

My son started kindergarten this year, and I'm thrilled that he's starting to sound out words he sees and words that he uses! I really get into asking him how he thinks words are spelled, and he does pretty well for about 5 minutes, and then he's over it and wants to do something else. He's starting to have short homework assignments every week (basically sounding out words and reviewing sight words that they've learned in class), but it takes longer than 5 minutes, so after the first 5 minutes, it's been painful trying to keep him on task long enough to finish the assignment. The assignment would take maybe 20 minutes if he just did it, but he starts saying random words when he gets tired of doing it, so it's been dragging on for around 3 hours every week and getting split into multiple days just to get through it.

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that he might do better if he only saw one word at a time instead of the whole list of words, so I made a Google Slides presentation with his homework one week just to see if it would go better, and BOY was it SO. MUCH. FASTER! As an added bonus, having the homework in Google Slides means that it's always available on my phone, so if we have a few minutes here or there while we're out and about, we can go over some of the words.

It's not fancy, but it's been working really well for us. I made a few customizable templates that are available here: http://bit.ly/2QQPSKi.