First Grade Homeschool Language Arts and Websites to Make Learning Fun

First grade is very important year for language arts. It is when most children perfect their reading and comprehension skills and begin writing. If this year is a struggle, it sets the tone for subsequent years. While homeschoolers can choose to wait for clear signs of reading readiness, many will want to jump in and stay on track with the national guidelines. If this is you, you can make learning language arts skills fun by using the following websites and tips.

Reading is the first skill to be tackled in the first grade. Even if children have learned to read in previous years there will still be room for improvement. Children should be able to read age appropriate books as well as names, labels, and signs. To make learning to read fun for your homeschooled child look at these sites that teach reading, phonetic analysis, structural analysis, and sight vocabulary. Starfall.com has dozens of games that help children to learn reading and reading skills.

Reading is great, but without reading comprehension, the child will be lost. To know if your child understands what they are reading, you can have them act out the story in a simple pantomime or play, to retell stories, and to create their won stories or poems. Readquarium, a subsidiary of gamequarium also has lots of reading comprehension games.

Writing goes hand in hand with reading. To learn to write, students must be able to organize ideas and impressions, to orally and clearly retell information in the correct sequence. For some fun games that will help them along, check out Kids.aol.com reading and writing page.

Speaking, more specifically, enunciation and pronunciation is a very important part of first grade language arts. Children who cannot correctly pronounce a work often also spell it wrong. To help a child improve their pronunciation skills you can use these 15 top fun pronunciation games at TEFL.net. Once you have that down, you can concentrate on spelling. Here are some spelling games you can use: spelling city http://www.spellingcity.com/ and funbrain spelling.

Once your first grader has book his or her reading skills up to par and is beginning to write, it will be time to start working on book reports. They need to be able to discuss and critique what they have read. Teachnet.com has lots of ideas that can help you make the tedious job of writing book reports fun.

In addition to all things reading and writing, a first grade must learn to alphabetize words and find them in the dictionary. They need to learn some basic grammar such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, basic punctuation and capitalization. Here is a basic first grade grammar site you can use. Other skills you can teach a first grader is using table of contents and development of a newsletter. The internet4classrooms website will teach all of these skills and more.