Keeping a Word Notebook for Homeschooling Children

"One of the first things you want to do once your child starts learning the alphabet and the letter sounds is make a word notebook. This is going to be the crucial center of their education for the next 2 years possibly. Now you can actually do all of their homeschooling in one notebook or one for reading and writing and one for math. In the olden days, that's all students really had, one notebook and a pencil and a black board. They learned often much more efficiently than children learn today. But, if you want to work with the folders and worksheets, you know it's as advanced as complex as you want to make it or as simple as you want to make it. They will learn because it is one on one and you are the teacher. But a word notebook is a great place to start after they learn the alphabet and letter sounds. What we do basically is each page has a different type of word. Now in the beginning we're only going to do simple sounding out words, consonant, vowel, consonant with very natural short vowels like cat and can and pin and things like that. So we will start out and fill the pages with these. What I like to do is I like to switch up the different vowels, don't always do letters with a in the middle for too long. For pages and pages in the beginning we're just going to be doing these simple words but then each time we get a new rule, we'll put the rule at the top of the page and then fill that page with words that follow that rule and that's how we will keep our word notebook."