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This is another excellent site. Andrew Pudewa, Principle Instructor of Institute for Excellence in Writing, has produced MANY resources that will help you ensure your child is an effective communicator. Whether you need help instructing in writing, spelling, teaching the classics or poetry memorization, you really should consider some of his outstanding resources. Andrew STRONGLY encourages parents to read to their children out loud, particularly unabridged classic literature. He loves my Henty Books on Tape, and we used his writing resources in our own home school. Do check him out!

www.writing-edu.com

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Andrew Pudewa. Andrew spoke to me at a few home education conferences in 2005 and 2006 to encourage me in my work recording the Henty historical novels. The reason for his encouragement is contained in the excerpt below, reprinted with permission.

"What activity will allow children to store complete, reliably correct, and sophisticated language patterns in their brains?

Probably the two most important but least practiced of all school activities: Listening (being read to out loud) and memorization. These two are perhaps the most traditional of all language acquisition activities, and yet…they have become the orphan children of the progressive parents of psychology and pedagogy.

One of the biggest mistakes we make as parents and teachers is to stop reading out loud to our children when they reach the age of reading faster independently. In doing so, not only do we deprive them of the opportunity to hear these all-important reliably correct and sophisticated language patterns, but we also lose the chance to read to them above their level, stretching and expanding their vocabulary, interests, and understanding.

We begin to lose the chance to discuss words and their nuances, idioms, cultural expressions, and historical connotations. And they lose something far more valuable than even the linguistic enrichment that oral reading provides; they lose the opportunity to develop attentiveness, the chance to experience the dramatic feeling that a good reader can inject, and even the habit of asking questions about what they've heard.

Tragically, because of our hectic, entertainment-saturated, individualistic, test-obsessed, and overscheduled lives, few of us take sufficient time to read out loud to our students, even into their early teens – a sensitive period when understanding of language and understanding of life are woven together and sealed into the intellect."