English Homeschool Curriculum

Kindergarten students using the Horizons curriculum will learn consonant blends, double vowels, ending blends, and more. Manuscript style of writing is used for exercises on colorful, perforated pages. Includes 80 lessons on 380 pages. This is book two of two for Kindergarten Phonics and Reading.

Watch an overview by Gretchen.

"Our schools should be accountable, but do they have to become joyless halls of drudgery? I'm not against measuring student achievement and learning. But can't we develop lessons that use the best of what we know about learning and about children, lessons informed by research and results, lessons that include color, life, conversation and laughter?" -Gretchen Bernabei

Crunchtime is a practical grab-and-go resource for teachers.

Crunchtime strategies are engaging and fun for students.

Crunchtime is especially effective in helping struggling writers, including English language learners.

In this eagerly-anticipated teacher resource, master teachers Gretchen Bernabei, Jayne Hover, and Cynthia Candler share writing lessons that are healthy for kids, promote lifelong literacy, and, coincidentally, will help your students blow the roof off of their state test scores. Organized around the writing process-selecting topics, crafting drafts, and polishing finished pieces-explicit lessons engage student writers while shoring up the gaps between learning and testing. Growing out of their own work in Title I schools, Gretchen, Jayne, and Cynthia's strategies have proven to be especially effective in helping ESL and special education students, not only pass the test, but achieve commended performance. In addition to providing classroom-tested strategies, this practical teaching resource provides a wealth of crunchtime tools (rubrics, reproducibles, and writing samples) minilessons, and lesson plans that will help you teach strategically and position your students for success on their state writing tests and beyond.

Crunchtime includes the following downloadable resources: 4-week planner, writing prompts, and reproducibles.

Harvey S. Wiener shows how parents can encourage their children to write with a home program that can be used from preschool through high school. Beginning with the building of attitudes, Wiener moves through simple, varied and practical experience with the written word. By setting up an atmosphere in the home that encourages creative written expression, coupled with a parent's guidance in writing, children gain an outlook on writing that builds confidence in their abilities to use language.
This new edition addresses many heated issues about children's education and touches on today's critical debates: parents' roles in school preparations, the increased stress on writing assessment and performance measures throughout a child's education and across school sectors, and the debate over phonics. A revised and expanded section called "Key Books for Young Writers and Their Parents" will help any family stock its shelves with useful books for a home writing program.
A new chapter discusses the ubiquity of home computers and word processing programs and assesses their positive and negative influences on children's home learning experiences. In addition, Wiener describes how to find the best educational online resources and how to supervise a child's work on the Internet. Furthermore, he emphasizes the importance of collaboration--child and parent, child and sibling--to help avoid computer abuse and establish good computer practices. Finally, he integrates discussion on computers through the text, and also offers writing exercises and samples for children to obtain from Oxford's website.

Skills Taught:
- One- and two-level outlining
- Writing chronological narratives, biographical sketches, descriptions, and sequences across the curriculum
- Constructing basic literary essays on fiction and poetry
- Researching and documenting source material
- First volume of four that will prepare students for high-level rhetoric and composition

Features of the program:
- Writing assignments are modeled on examples from great literature and classic nonfiction
- All source material for assignments is provided--no other books are needed
- This Instructor Text provides scripted dialogue to use when the student has difficulty, plus detailed guidance on how to evaluate the student's work
- Student Workbook (sold separately) encourages independence by directing all assignments to the student
- First volume of four that will prepare students for high-level rhetoric and composition

The Practice CD gives your child an opportunity to hear each sentence read and classified aloud. Your child can follow along with the Practice CDs to reinforce what he/she has learned. In addition, your child can use the CD to check his/her work independently. The practice CDs are not required, but are available for parents who want to use these additional tools for their children."