Q&A Capital or Lower Case Letters First

from Yahoo! Answers:

A question for parents who home school pre-k or kindergarten.

I have just started homeschooling my 5 year old son. Along with two other 4 year old boys. I have lots of different books/workbooks that were given to me before we started. Some say to teach capital letters first, then learn lower case. Others say to teach them at the same time. Any parents that have dealt with this, and opinions on which way is better. I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

Blessings,
Jennifer

My Answer:

I home schooled other people's kids (mostly 5-12 year olds) for about 5 years and preferred to take an informal approach to reading and writing.

Think about it this way, did you teach your child to speak vowels first or consonants?

Of course, you didn't "teach" your child to speak consonants and vowels they simply learned them. The way they learned them was by being completely immersed in spoken language.

I recommend teaching reading and writing in the same way. Make sure that you read and write as part of your everyday activities when you are with the kids.

Let me give you an example of how I did this with two my students one day. I was teaching two 7 or 8 year old boys who decided that they wanted to order pizza to be delivered for lunch. I said that was a great idea and handed them a phone book.

Now neither of these kids were readers yet, so this presented a significant challenge. They needed to know the alphabet and how to look up "pizza" and then the phone etiquette for getting the necessary information about how much it would cost. Then they had to figure out if we could afford it with the budget that we had for each day.

I do not think we even had pizza that day, but based on their enthusiasm for the idea they learned about the alphabet, etiquette, math and probably more than that.

I helped when asked and to the extent that they requested. Their learning was driven by the fact that much of what they needed to do to accomplish their own goals required literacy skills. Therefore they learned a variety of literacy skills because that was what they needed to accomplish their goals.

Source(s):
My web site

Q&A: Components of Attitude

This post has been converted to a page on my site:

Attitude Simplified
Attitude is how you arrange the mental furniture of your body/mind re-creational vehicle as you explore the world of your experiences.

It was originally written for Yahoo! Answers:

What are the key components of attitude?

Posted by: james_jass

Food for Thought from Around The World

I don't mean metaphorical food I mean literally thinking about food from around the world. Peter Menzel and his wife, Faith D'Aluisio, traveled the world to find out what people actually eat every week and created a book called The Hungry Planet. They took pictures of each family surrounded by a week's worth of food and those pictures have been making the rounds by e-mail and blog posts like this one.

Here's are two examples,

the Aboubakar family from a refugee camp in Chad who spend under $2 (which is subsidized by relief organizations to cover the other $22 in cost)



and


the Melander family from Germany who spend just over $500.




Here's links to find out more:
The Book

NPR Story

Time Magazine Story- Part I - Part II

Map of 20 of the families