Starting at Square One
Chapter 6

Teaching with Sentences

At AVKO we don’t believe in starting the learning-to-read process by giving the child Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to read.  We believe in crawling before we walk and walking before we run, and running before we do the high hurdles.  So it is that we teach sentences before we teach paragraphs and paragraphs before short books, and short books before chapters and chapters before long books:

There are lots of grammar books on the market.  Some good, some dull and boring, and some that are utterly confusing.  Use whatever works for you and your child.  But before you get to teaching grammar formally as such, you can create sentences from the words you have taught to your children.

You can really have fun creating silly sentences once your alphabet strip looks like this:

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R

S

T

 

 

W

 

Y

 

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

r

s

t

 

 

w

 

y

 

You can have:

Gee, is dad a bee?    Gee, is dad a Óíe?     Gee, is dad a bee?

Is he a bee?            Is he a Óíe?            Is he a bee?

Is he a tree?           Is he a tree?           Is he a tree? 

Is that dad’s car?   Is that dad’s car      Is that dad’s car?

Are there trees here?   Are there trees here?    Are there trees here?

Whatever sentences you and your children create, you can constantly put them into different fonts so that they are learning to respond to the letters and not the appearance or “sight picture” of the words.

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