Homeschooling in California

My daughter is learning to read right now. I stumbled on Starfall.com well before I started any formal reading instruction with her, but now that she’s learning phonics rules, we visit Starfall together to read the stories there.

I thought at first that she loved this site only because she loves to play on the computer, but she is only allowed to do it for a short time, and not every day. It was bonus computer time – what’s not to love? Now I know that isn’t it. She has plenty of computer games that she doesn’t care for, even ones featuring some of her favorite cartoon characters. But she loves the Starfall stories, and works really hard to read each story by herself.

The stories in the section we use the most, Learn to read, are arranged by what phonics skill they work on, like the short ‘a’ sound, etc. It makes it easy for me to find a story that will compliment what we are learning about, and that she’ll be successful reading on her own.

The stories all can be read by the computer too, if you want. It starts by just displaying each page, but if you click on a word, it will show you how to sound it out. So there’s help for any words that she needs it for.

There are other, more advanced, reading sections too. We haven’t done much there yet, but I’m sure we will eventually. There is also a preschool section for learning letters and letter sounds. You can even print out writing worksheets that go along with the stories.

There are also some other activities there too, but learning to read, and phonics seem to be the main focus of the site. Last week we talked about calenders and the days of the week, and we made a calender at Starfall. I was disappointed that I didn’t see an obvious way to print out the calender my daughter made, but the game really did help her get the days of the week straight in her mind.

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