Using Self-Made Books to Homeschool Children

"Using self made books. You can start out from the beginning teaching a child the correct way to handle a book which is very important if you want your real books that you paid for to last much longer down the road. Tell them that the seam or the cover always goes to the left and you can teach them their left and right hands at the same time so that they don't take the book and start it from the back which is very natural and they would even put it upside down if it wasn't for the fact that the picture would be upside down. So teach them how to hold a book, teach them to always ready the title and the author and the illustrator. Sometimes I would put written by me or by my name and then illustrated by me and illustrated is a hard word, they'll just say that's illustrated, just say illustrated. So they read the title, they read who it's by, they read the illustrator. Then they open the first page and you can teach them about dedication pages and copyright and all that stuff down the road. But our books start here and they start reading. Teach them never to fold a book backwards like that because it breaks the binding. Teach them anything else you can think of to treat books correctly. Books are very important, books are to be treasured, teach them to love books from the beginning. And they start reading. Tracking, teach them to take their finger, put it underneath each word as they read it, that will help for a long time. It's kind of like training wheels, they don't do it forever but it helps in the beginning. A cat sat. And they will say a c-a-t, cat and if they couldn't get it, you will have them cover all but the first word and you treat this word as individual, tell them not to look at anything else until they've mastered that word. When they get it, have them start over and read from the beginning; a cat sat. Once they work that out, have them read the whole thing. A cat sat. Tada, look at the picture. As I'm making these books I try not to make the picture too obvious that they can just guess by looking at the pictures. Sometimes I'll put more things in the picture like another dog, or a rat or something so that they can't automatically guess what it is. The picture is the delight after they finish reading the correct sentence, to tell them yes, I read it correctly and look at that cool little cat that mommy or daddy or something drew. That looks very funny, maybe I could do a better job in a year, but in any case, that's how it works and there we have using self made books. Again, once again, keep them on a shelf, keep them in the same place all the time, teach your children to treasure books."