I am A. J. Hogue, the author of Effortless English, Learn to Speak English Like a Native, creator of the Power English course, the Effortless English VIP program, the Effortless English pronunciation course.
And the Effortless English Business English conversations course.
All available at EffortlessEnglishClub .com.
EffortlessEnglishClub .com.
Another walk and talk.
Today is a very chilly and wet day here in Indiana, Central Indiana.
We have gotten so much rain last week or so.
Just a huge amount.
I had a wheelbarrow sitting outside and it filled up with rain.
Like the water was almost at the top of it.
So we've - the property, a lot of the areas of the property are like a swamp, they're very super muddy and pools of water even in the grass and everywhere.
So very, very wet. And it's also quite chilly today.
We're supposed to get our - a couple nights of frost. Not tonight, but tomorrow night and the next night.
So that means that the temperature will drop to or below freezing.
So for Celsius it's probably going to drop down to about, I think it's supposed to drop down to zero, negative one, something like that, Celsius.
So we're going to get some frost. So still not planting yet.
We can't plant yet.
and it's quite interesting and I think that's going to be the last frost and that'll be April 9th and what's interesting is the the Almanacs, the Farmers Guides, the Planting Guides, for this area they all say to plant after April 10th that the last frost in this area is usually right around April 10th so looks like this year that's going to be exactly the case one day early April 9th will our last frost, I believe, because it looks like after that it'll start warming up a bit more.
Today I think Celsius is about seven degrees.
Something like that.
With the wet, makes it feel a bit chilly.
So we've been spinning a lot of time indoors the last few days.
It just rained pretty much non -stop yesterday and then today rained in the morning and last night.
But the day before that, it was raining, so we've just been having time at home, which is quite nice with the kids and family.
It's quite nice to have those days.
We just make bread.
I mentioned we have an ice cream maker, so we make our own ice cream.
The reason—there's two reasons I've started focusing on making our own food.
Like when I was young, I used to eat out at restaurants all the time.
My 20s and 30s, even into my 40s, I would go out to restaurants quite often.
Didn't cook it much at home.
But since I've had kids, number one, with kids, it's a lot harder to go to a restaurant.
Kids are active and noisy, and they don't want to sit in chairs for a long time.
So there's that challenge.
it's one reason it's just easier to stay home.
We have taken the kids to restaurants a few times but the main reason is health.
That I'm focused on my own health because I'm 57 years old now and I need to stay healthy and energetic for my children, you know, at least until they're grown.
So it's almost impossible to stay healthy if you eat out at restaurants frequently because they just to use garbage ingredients.
They use industrial ingredients, I guess, unless you're going to a top Michelin -starred restaurant every day, which most people cannot afford to do that.
You're probably eating a lot of industrial seed oils cause they're cheaper and most restaurants will use those and non -organic ingredients.
It's especially a problem in the United States.
Now I do realize different countries are different.
you know, Japan for example, the overall food quality at the grocery stores and in restaurants is higher.
Meaning it's healthier, it's more natural, real food, higher quality food, which is probably the main reason that the Japanese are not all super fat.
Most Japanese remain quite thin and are far healthier than Americans, and I would say, you know, It depends on the country, but overall, this is also true certainly in continental Europe that, again, I think just the food ingredients are better.
Even the processed food seems to have fewer chemical and toxic ingredients.
It's still not good.
It's not health food.
It's still not great, but better than the United States, better than Canada, and probably Mexico.
I think Mexico is pretty similar to the United States.
So because for all these reasons, I just realized like, okay, you know, we just need to make food at home.
It started with bread because at the grocery stores here, all the bread has a bunch of junk added to it.
Now they say they're, you know, they say they're making it more nutritious, but they don't.
They they add vitamins, but the form the kind of vitamins they use are, of course, the cheapest possible kind they're kind of just get very chemical and actually you know with our kids they have we've actually had them tested for this that they there's certain forms of vitamins that are just not good for them specifically folic acid is one of the main ones and they add it to all the bread here and then they add All the bread here in the grocery stores is made with seed oils with You know Unsaturated Kind of industrial oils.
They add it to all the bread So it's like ah, you know traditional real bread as our ancestors made hundreds of years ago and for Hundreds and thousands of years.
It's perfectly healthy but that modern industrial bread is garbage.
So I realized, okay, well, I can find bread...
Basic bread is very, very simple.
You can make it with water, flour, salt, and yeast. And then some people will add...
Sometimes you can also add a little sugar.
You can add a little bit of milk.
You can add an egg, depending on what kind of variety you want.
The most basic kind is just flour, water, salt, and yeast. And here in the States, it is easier, especially online, you can find healthy ingredients, basic ingredients, if you're willing to make things yourself.
So, can you find healthy bread in a grocery store?
not really, no. But if you're willing to make it at home, you can find healthy flour that doesn't have any junk added to it.
That's organic. You know, and there's all kinds of a lot of choices.
This is one good thing in America is that while the main groceries in the in restaurants and the kind of general food is horrible, there is a counterculture, there's a subculture of health food, especially online now, where people who wanna be healthy have created a demand for much, much healthier, more natural ingredients.
So you can find them.
You just gotta do a little extra work.
The main thing is you gotta make your own food at home.
So, I started with that and I got a bread maker and said, haha, well, I'll get a bread maker.
They got bread machines now.
It makes it really easy, you know, with kids it's nice to be able to do it fast. You just throw everything into the bread machine and turn it on and it does everything for you.
Just, it mixes it, lets it sit.
It rises and then it bakes it.
And the bread is fantastic.
It tastes great and it's healthy and the kids like it and I like it and it's great for the kids to, you know, see how bread is made.
It doesn't just come in a From the store where we have to get flour and you know we can learn about where flour comes from you know comes from wheat and Grind it up and and so they helped me now make the bread and every day or two we make fresh bread and Fresh bread is fantastic.
It's so much better than Bread that's been sitting on a shelf so homemade bread is how it started so next I looked into ice cream the kids love ice cream, but But again, store bought ice cream or restaurant ice cream is, in the States, is garbage.
They add, you know, first of all the milk, the kind of milk they use is not very healthy, not very good, and then they just add all these like, these extra ingredients so that it'll stay on the shelf longer, and so that it's, they're called emulsifiers, so the ingredients mix more easily.
and just all these industrial ingredients which are terrible.
Not good for them, not good for us.
And again, the vegetable oils, constantly adding these garbage oils.
So, you know, you do research. Real ice cream, again, the ice cream that our ancestors made, you know, let's say a hundred years ago.
It's actually quite healthy.
is just milk, sugar, eggs and cream.
That's it. And then you chill it down and make it cold.
There's actually, none of those things are unhealthy.
Even the sugar is not bad.
Except if you've got a decent metabolism, if you're active.
You know, that just basic, clean, pure sugar is not that terrible.
It's when it's combined with all the other junk where it becomes bad.
And of course, if you're overweight, maybe eating lots of ice cream's not gonna be good for your weight, but it's not unhealthy.
And especially for kids or very active people and not eating it, you know, constantly, homemade ice cream is not bad.
And so we get, luckily, again, at the grocery store, crap milk, which they boil and pasteurize and do all kinds of junk to it.
but here we have local farms and we get raw milk from local cows delivered.
They eat a liver, they drive and they, it's a free delivery.
They deliver it right to our house every week.
And we get the same.
They also have heavy cream and we get that delivered from the in the 1950s, this was a common thing.
They had milkmen and they would drive around in vans and everybody got their milk fresh from local farms delivered to their house.
They would put them in these big metal canisters and deliver it around.
You'll see it in movies sometimes that if they're set in the United States and around that time like the 1940s and 1950s that you'll sometimes see this in movies where there'll be a milkman, and he drives around and he brings fresh milk to people every week.
So it's kind of the same thing.
It's just, it's kind of going back in time in a way.
So we get raw, fresh local milk from local cows, organic farms, local right here in Indiana.
It's one of the nice things about living in a farm state.
And then, you know, basic sugar is, we just add sugar and then we get local eggs too.
That same farm actually has chickens, and we get their pasture raised chickens so they're not industrial.
Even the grocery store they'll say they're cage -free, but if you do a little research, these companies, they're so tricky.
They'll put all this marketing on their eggs or their food packages, and they'll say, start digging in and the case they'll say it's cage free but they're still inside this kind of they're packed into this building where they can hardly move at all and it's nowhere near not natural at all not healthy at all and not humane either so here this farm we can go visit they they let you can come and tour in fact I think we're going to do it sometime take the kids and then you go see the cows and the chickens and go around so these are chickens that are, you know, of course they're fenced in and protected
so that animals don't get them.
But, you know, they're, they feed them some grains and food, but they're also just running around in the grass eating bugs, which is what they're supposed to do.
So we get eggs delivered from this same farm too.
So there we have all our basic ingredients for ice cream, and they're all local and natural and healthy and not full of chemicals and Garbage, and crap oils, and all that other junk they add.
So that's really nice, I like it.
So I decided, okay, the kids love ice cream.
I personally also like ice cream quite a lot.
Spring's coming, then summer, and we always love to eat ice cream, so I'm not gonna buy this stuff at the grocery store because it's terrible.
I think, especially with my son and the heart surgeries he's had and the problems that we're really sensitive about health.
So I thought, okay, you know what, will just get I started researching and about ice cream makers that you know home making ice cream at home and yeah well there's a there's all kinds of different ones you can buy and they're they're really nice like when I was a kid I remember they had this ice cream thing but you had to had to like go buy salt the special rock salt and you had to put ice in the machine got to go buy ice or make a bunch of ice and it's kind of a difficult process but now it's all just electronic, it's real simple you just put all the ingredients in a bowl, mix them up, pour it
in the ice cream maker, and turn it on and then it'll it gets really really super cold and it only takes about an hour and then we get fresh ice cream with pure ingredients.
It's fantastic. It's really nice and again the kids love helping to to make it and get the ingredients and now they They also understand where ice cream comes from and what it's made with.
And it's a nice project for all of us.
And I'm starting to enjoy now making food at home.
This kind of had led to the next project, which is the big garden.
So, you know, once again, it's like, well, it's like, okay, what's the next kind of food?
Well, vegetables. Vegetables, a lot of the, I'm not impressed with the vegetables at the grocery stores here.
We can buy some veggies from the local farms here.
They have farmer's markets.
Of course, more in the late spring, summer and fall.
Not right now. But we'll, so we'll do that.
We'll go to some farmer's markets and we can also order from some of the local farms and they'll deliver here, which is great.
But I thought, well, what's the best thing would be to grow some of our own.
Why not? Getting into a little bit of Italian cooking this year.
so I thought, why not just grow some of these things?
Like, there's certain herbs and spices that a lot of the dishes use.
I'm like, OK, well, why don't I just grow myself in the garden?
We can grow our own tomatoes.
We can grow our own, you know, a lot of our own veggies, so we're going to try it this year, see how it goes.
We're also going to try—we're going to plant some blueberry bushes, because the kids and I really love blueberries, it's one of our favorite little sweet healthy snacks.
So we'll try that too.
So while, you know, on the negative side, the food in the grocery stores is garbage, but on the positive side, it's led us to now, you know, to be...
it's kind of, again, like a return to our to return to our ancestors, try to grow more of our own food, or buy it from local organic, humane farms, right here, not far from us.
Yesterday, I talked about superior education and told you all about the Thomas Jefferson education approach that I'm using with my kids for homeschooling as a general guideline.
I'd like to talk about one more thing I'm doing with them, specifically for reading.
Because in the Thomas Jefferson approach, they don't really talk too much about the actual skill of reading, like how do you teach the kids to be able to read?
Once they're reading, well then of course you're focusing on classics, of course you're allowed to them and then eventually they're reading themselves.
But how do you get them to that point?
It's a good question, right?
The actual ability to read.
And of course, in our case, in English.
So I'd like to talk to you about the approach I'm using that I think is very good.
And we actually got it from Doman International.
And Doman, they work with brain -injured...
predominantly kids...
brain -injured kids.
They have worked with adults too, and this includes...
and also, you know, kids who have Down syndrome or autism or various brain injuries or just issues with, you know, general brain function.
And so, they have an approach to reading that has worked very, very, very well, and I like it.
Because one thing you have to be careful of...this is, again, a problem with the schools, because we have two things with reading, right?
And it's quite similar to you learning English.
There is the sort of skills, the basic skills, right?
So the ability to read, to recognize words and understand them.
And then there's the content.
What are the words communicating?
What are the ideas?
Right? The stories.
This is what we talked about yesterday with focusing on classics, right?
What do you read? And it's quite similar to you like with English, Okay, there's the, you know, the linguistic aspects, parts of the language— vocab, grammar, pronunciation.
But then there's the actual communication.
What are you talking about?
How do you communicate?
What do you read? What do you listen to?
How do you develop that ability to communicate?
And the problem with so many schools— most schools and traditional programs is they focus too much, they put too much time, too much effort, too much focus on the skills and the analyzing of those skills.
And they don't put enough focus or time or effort on the actual communication and the actual real whole language.
And this is why the school methods can be so incredibly stressful and boring.
So this is the same even with native speakers so here in the States they focus so much in the elementary school ages and the elementary schools so that's before teenager.
They focus so much on the the skills of English the pieces of the language so memorizing how to spell thousands of words and learning some you know the parts of speech for grammar we don't really do verb tense as much because we all kind of naturally understand those but there are other parts of grammar connected to writing that kids do learn about.
And, you know, they go crazy with the phonics of not just the basic sounds of the letters but then all these rules and rules and exceptions for all the different combinations of letters.
And so, you know, you can imagine how does a seven year old kid feel about all that.
Well, it's boring as hell, because it's just this kind of abstract linguistic information that doesn't mean much to them, because there's no content, that's not actually teaching any ideas, there's no story, there's no ideas, there's no emotion, there's nothing.
And so, number one, it's not very effective, a lot of time is wasted for not a lot of benefit.
And number two, it tends to kill, again, their enjoyment of reading because they begin to think of reading as this, this annoying process.
I have to be tested on spelling all these words and remembering all this vocab and all these phonics rules and all that, you know.
So, how can you teach the basic skills of reading from at the beginning when the kids can't read at all, zero.
How do you get them to a point where they can start reading on their own without boring them with all this over analysis and I think that both Dr. Stephen Krashen and Doman International have got some great ideas and they've worked very well with both my kids and my kids are very very different.
You know one is like you know you would say probably would be very, very advanced.
Tends to just learn everything super -fast, very early, and then the other is, you know, it takes more time.
It's kind of behind.
And tends to pick up things later.
And yet these methods have worked great for them.
And the great thing about these two methods is that you don't waste a lot of time on this skill of reading.
It's not boring. It's—they can focus mostly on content and enjoying stories, and they stay connected to reading because of that, because it's meaningful to them.
So, the first thing is basic phonics.
Crash and diddle has analyzed tons of research about this, and here's what you want with phonics.
This is—again, obviously, this is for a language like English, which is semi -phonetic, right?
For a language like Spanish or Italian, this would be so easy, because, you know, the spelling and the pronunciation are so consistent.
So you can just teach those sounds and I would imagine it would be so much easier than English, which has a lot of weird spellings and it can get complicated.
Now, teaching things like how to read Kanji or Chinese characters, I don't know how to do that, sorry.
You can find your own way on that one.
But for English, you teach basic phonics.
What does that mean?
You just take the basic sounds of the letters, right?
Some letters have, make one sound like b, b, b, b, and then there's some, like, c that have you know two sounds or s right and then the vowels get a little complicated aeio and you but in the beginning you can just teach short and long that's what I kind of learned when I was a kid so like for a the short a is is is a like cat and the long one is says its name a like Air Of course there's also ah like father, and it gets complicated, right?
But you don't want to overwhelm them with the complication, okay?
They'll kind of figure that out intuitively, naturally, okay?
So again, everything does not need to be taught directly and memorized as rules, okay?
A lot of these things, just by reading a lot reading a lot and learning lots of words and seeing and reading lots of words and getting used to them, a lot of these more complicated patterns and exceptions as they're called in English, the kids will just naturally begin to recognize them and you never need to mention them, they just will learn it.
Like e -i -g -h, right?
Well that's weird like if you just looked at it you wouldn't necessarily know exactly how to pronounce that.
But you know, they see the word like eight e -i -g -h -t and then they'll learn that word 8, and they'll learn to read it, and then they It might be the word, freight, F -R -E -I -G -H -T.
And that's enough. Just the two examples gives them enough of a pattern where they'll kind of have a maybe an unconscious understanding of that combination of letters and how to pronounce them, or at least how to guess it.
You don't need to teach it.
You don't need to have flashcards with E -I -G -H on it.
and then quiz them on it.
And the truth is, there's words like height where then it's not pronounced that way.
So then it can be quite confusing for them.
So there's a balance of whole word, just learning whole words, recognize them, almost like you would recognize a kanji, like a Chinese character, just seeing the whole thing and knowing how to say it.
Then phonics, which is understanding the parts, the letters.
For English, because it's so complicated with the various spellings, you need a combination of both, and that's exactly what Krashen recommended.
In the schools here, they're always debating this.
Phonics or whole word?
Phonics or whole word?
Phonics or whole word?
And then they'll go several years.
You'll have 10 years where the schools are all teaching phonics, phonics, phonics, It's all phonics, phonics is the way.
And then they'll just suddenly switch and phonics will no longer be fashionable and then it's whole word, whole word, whole language, whole language.
And they'll do that for, you know, five, ten years.
And then they'll switch back to phonics again.
And of course it's ridiculous because they're both useful.
So the answer is both.
For phonics, all the kids need to learn, even if you're teaching your own kids to start learning English and reading it.
Just teach him the basics of phonics.
How can you do that?
Songs. My kids learned with songs.
There's a guy named Jack Hartman on YouTube.
Jack Hartman. You can look him up.
And he's got a bunch of songs.
He's got several songs about the letter sounds in English.
Letter sounds. And it's Just, you know, he's like A is for apple, ah, ah, apple.
B is for boy, buh, buh, boy.
You know, it's that kind of thing and it's different, different tunes, different songs.
But he just goes through the alphabet and says the sound of the letter and then shows it on the screen.
And that's enough, you played that enough for them as little kids.
They'll get, they'll start singing the songs and that's how my kids, my kids learned all the letter sounds just with those songs.
And he's just teaching the basics.
He's not teaching a ton of combinations.
He does have some other songs where he does a few letter blends, so he might take two letters and put them together as a combination, and he makes a little song about that.
So you know, BR is brrrr brrrr brrrrr, you know something like that.
Really simple and basic, and that's all you need for phonics.
You do not need to go past that.
After that, it's time to jump to whole word. Once your kids know the basic phonics, you just...
Oops, jumping on the lawnmower here.
After that, you just jump over to whole word and let them start learning words.
And when you're doing whole words, you don't need to worry too much about keeping it short and simple.
Just, you want them to learn words that they find in stories, and this brings us to our main technique, and that is called homemade books which I am doing big time now with my kids.
This is the main way to get them into real reading after they can do basic phonics.
Homemade books. This comes from Dolmen, Dolmen International, and it's fantastic.
I think I've talked about it in a video in the We tried it in the past a couple years ago, and it didn't go very well.
So as I mentioned yesterday when things don't go well, we just take a break and then we try it again later.
So now two years later, we're trying homemade books again.
They're going great.
This does require a bit of work for you as a parent, but it's worth it.
So what do you do? You just make books for your kids to read and you make them.
Here are the things that make this powerful.
Number one, of course, you keep the vocab and the sentences super short, limited.
So most—and all you do with a homemade book is you have one page.
You have a sentence.
And many times it's just one word. You know, like right now we're doing maybe three words maximum for our sentences.
Very short. And then on the next page, there's a picture that connects to the sentence.
And that's it. Why is this so powerful?
Well, number one, because you're only using, let's say, three words, you're keeping things short, you make the text very, very large.
This is something that Domon figured out.
They figured out that one of the challenges for young kids in learning to read is that it's difficult for them to see and read the small print in so many books, even in kids books.
That the print is just too small and it's hard for them to really recognize all the letter shapes when the writing is so small.
And they found that just by making the letters as big as possible, really really big, like you know, the font I use is like a hundred.
A hundred point font Or bigger, even, if you can do it.
But I try not to go smaller than 100.
So pretty big, so they can see each letter very clearly.
They can see the word very clearly when it's that big.
And this helps these young learners recognize the letters and read.
It really makes it much easier for them to read.
So that's point number one.
Number two, because it's a homemade book, of course, what do you do?
You connect the book, the all these books that you make, these homemade books, you make them about topics and pictures and subjects that your kids are interested in.
You connect it to them.
And ideally, whenever you can, make them the main character of the book.
So, let me give you an example of this.
Our first homemade book this time around starting again was just the story of my children's birth.
Okay, so it's just like, okay, you know, they were, you were born on and, you know, give their date their birthday.
And then we say, you were born, you know, born and sometimes I just drop words.
So I'll make it really simple, like, born on with the date.
And I'll say born at, and I'll give it in the city, right?
And then, you know, my son, of course, when he was born, he had to stay in the hospital for two and a half months, he had a heart surgery after just one month of being alive.
So, we put that in the book.
It's like the story, like it's like, you know, my son's story, this kind of family history, this family story, this family challenge and adventure, make it into a book." And we have pictures, of course, from all of this.
So we'll say, you know, Osaka Hospital first surgery.
And then I have a picture of, you know, him in the hospital there.
And then the book ends with him coming home, like, yeah, finally, you know, he comes home.
And then we have a picture of when we came home bringing him home again the first day And then you know happy family together is the last page And we have our picture of our our first family photo.
We took that day that he came home So this this book is probably I think it's about 16 pages long, but half of those pages are pictures.
So it's only maybe eight sentences, something like that.
And then I print them out and staple it together and that's a homemade book.
Now the next thing I do is I get flashcards, these big, the biggest flashcards you can find, okay?
Big. And then I'll take, I'll write down individual words that are in the homemade book.
It's like, the word hospital is one of them.
We're, that's on, we have these flashcards now.
And I'll put them in groups of five, and we have three groups, so he's got about fifty.
They, both of them, daughter and son, they're learning like about fifteen.
They're reviewing fifteen words in the flashcards, but those same words are also in the homemade books.
So hospital. The word Osaka is there because, Osaka Hospital is where he had his first surgery.
Born. The word born.
The word birthday. One thing you'll notice, see, is I'm not sticking to just super short simple words the way a lot of textbooks or beginner reading books, Like, they just do like cat -at -sat, right?
They do like little, short two - and three -letter words only.
We don't do that. We do any, whatever the word is, if it's useful, if it has a meaning to them, if it's in that book, it's in this story that to them is interesting, they learn it.
So they can read the word hospital now.
I show them the word hospital.
I mix it up on the flashcards, and they recognize the word hospital.
They recognize the word. They also have simple words like to and go and with.
But they can also read Osaka.
They can read hospital, born, birth, home.
So what do you do then is two or three times a day.
You race through your flashcards really fast. So you sit down with the kids and fast. You don't really test them you just, you read them aloud yourself.
You don't ask them to do it.
So I just show them a card and I'll say, hospital and then onto the next card. Osaka.
Go. With. Help. Home.
Surgery. Right, it's that fast. So it takes less than a minute to do 15 cards.
Put that away, keep it quick, entertaining, lively.
Don't wanna waste too much time on that because that's a kind of a school activity.
It's not really very interesting.
You try to make it a game, try to make it exciting, but mostly fast, fast, fast, and then what do we do?
Then we get the book, which is super interesting to them.
It's about their own life.
And we've got pictures of them in the book.
This is better than any kids' book even because this is, you know, this is fascinating to them, the story of your birth, when you were born, and oh, then, you know, our son had, you know, be in the hospital and oh, and then the rest of us, our daughter and mom and dad, we visit him in the hospital.
And then we, you know, we're waiting at home.
And it's like this kind of drama.
We make it like a little drama.
And it's interesting.
This is their own history.
So they love reading it and of course they see those same words that are on the flashcards, they see them in the book then.
And then what you want to do, you want to make one or two of these books, new books, every week.
Every week, so constantly it's new.
That's why I keep them short.
But always connected, connected - connected to the kids.
It doesn't always have to be about their history or family history.
It could be about something they really like, you know, like my son's really into airplanes right now.
So I'll probably make one about airplanes.
I could find some pictures of airplanes on the on the Internet and copy them to my computer and I could make a little book about airplanes but you know the thing is I probably would connect it to him and to our family too because we had, they have flown on airplanes before.
We took a vacation to Guam and of course we took a you know a big couple big long flights from Japan to get here to Indiana and we've got pictures so again whenever you can, you want to include your kids as characters in the books.
And this is how this is now you're using a whole word approach because with these flash cards and with the words they're seeing again, you know, repeating in the homemade book as you read to them, now they're learning whole words.
And sometimes, if you want, you can kind of, you can kind of review the sounds of the letters.
Like there's another homemade book we have is about the zoo because we go to the zoo a lot.
So I've got lots of pictures of us visiting the zoo and going to the zoo.
And this I made one book about the Japanese zoo, because we always used to go to the Osaka zoo.
And one of the words is flamingos.
It's kind of long, a little difficult.
So when we get to word flamingo.
You know, I'll kind of, I'll emphasize, I'll point to the F and go, fl fl fl flamingo, and then I just you know, use my finger as I say the word flamingo.
Now I should make a point, when you make the homemade books, you want the words and the pictures on different pages, and you only want them to see one at a time.
So in other words, when you staple it together, you want them, let's say you you open the book, you want them to see the word, let's say Flamingo.
Okay, so you see the word written in big letters, Flamingo or Flamingos.
But you don't want them to see any pictures, no pictures, there's not any pictures, they can't see it, you have to turn the page to see the picture that that's important, because otherwise they'll just see the picture and they'll just say it right they'll know it they're not really gonna focus on the writing.
So, when the words on the page you want them to only be able to see the words you don't want them to be able to see the picture until you turn the page.
So, it's only you know one page at a time right you're not in other words don't print on both sides of the paper you wanna when you print your words and you print the pictures print them only on one side so when you staple it together first they see the word or the words the sentence and it's nice and big and you read it and then after you read it then you turn the page and there's the picture of whatever you just read and that's how you do a homemade book and you want to make let's say, you know, your goal would be to make a new one every single week.
And then as you finish one, let's say you finish one, like our first one was about them being born.
Okay, it's done. Now I make a new one.
It's about the zoo.
So, you don't throw away the book about them being born.
Just put it on the shelf.
And even though you might not be focusing on it, you, the parent, they still might want to read it sometimes, like that my kids, they just like it.
So they go get it from the shelf and bring it to me, and I want to read the the baby book, I think they call it right.
So they'll bring it over and then we'll just read it, it'll just, you'll continue reading it.
But each week, you have like one new book that you're focusing on, and then you as the parent will actually sit down and you read that book to them two or three times in the day.
So you might do it once in the morning, and once in the evening, if you want to just a relaxed schedule.
So, in the morning you go through your flashcards with the words from that new book really fast, super fast, and then you read the book and in the evening, you do the same thing.
You do that for a full week with that new book and then the next week you start another new book and new flashcards.
And, you just keep doing that week after week after week.
And of course, for review, you really don't need to force the review.
Again, as you make books, just put the old ones on a shelf, and let them bring them to you.
They'll have their favorite ones.
And that's the time when they'll get to review some of those old words when they see them in those old homemade books you have. And of you also continue reading to them from different classic kids books.
So we're still reading Peter Rabbit, we're still reading, I mentioned we're doing Aesop's book, Aesop's Stories now.
So usually, if you want the whole reading session, what it looks like.
We do quick flashcards, which I go as fast as I can with that.
Then we'll read the new homemade book, right this week is the one about the zoo.
and then we'll read...then I'll read some stuff from Aesop, or sometimes they have something they want me to read.
I always... if they choose something, I always do that.
I will make that my first priority because they're interested in it, and I want to, I want them to stay engaged.
So some... they might bring me Peter Rabbit even though I want to do Aesop, if they bring me Peter Rabbit I'm just gonna read Peter Rabbit.
and you know, we can do Aesop another time, it's no big deal.
So you can imagine, week after week after week, they will be getting exposed to these words again and again and they'll learn words even that you don't do the flashcard. So don't worry if you're like, oh, we haven't done some of the common words, you know, we haven't done the word went with a flashcard yet.
Well, they're gonna see that, it's such a common word, they'll see it in the stories in the Homemade Books so many times that, yeah, they're eventually gonna get it even if you never put it on a flash card so don't stress about it.
So that's the way you do it and of course eventually as they get more and more words and also when you read aloud to them with books, a little trick you can use it's so simple.
Some of you maybe do this already but some people don't.
but it's just use your finger and, you know, put your finger under the words as you read them.
So you move your finger along with the words in the book so they can connect.
They're looking at the book—of course, a lot of times, they're looking at the pictures—but they also will notice your finger.
So they'll notice your finger—so you're saying the words and your finger's pointing to those words that you're reading.
And believe it or not, they are gonna pick up on that.
You'll be surprised that they're gonna learn words that way, especially if they're books that have, you know, where the writing's fairly big, so that's another way they'll, they'll get repetition, and they'll, they'll start to connect words with the writing just by, as you read along, don't go too fast and use your finger to point to the words that you're Don't go too slowly, either, don't make it unnatural, just move your finger along as you read.
There's some great opportunities with these homemade books, but I think you probably understand why this is so helpful for teaching them to read and to learn to read.
But you know the other great advantages of this is that you can teach them your family history, your family culture, your family values in a very powerful and kind of effortless way that is interesting to them.
Right? Like I could, of course with my son, okay, we could sit down with him and get all serious and try to talk about, you know, his heart and the surgeries he's had and dah, dah, dah, but this is such a great way, you know, we turn it into a story into like a drama and adventure the story of when you were born the story of your first heart surgery.
And I'll probably make more books, right, I could make another book about oh, you're about his some of his hospital stays and his second surgery and make another book about his third surgery and coming to America, and you can frame it in a way that's positive, that even these may be challenging, scary, painful experiences that the child may have had.
Well, you can turn them into a story where the kid is the hero and the kid overcomes all of that.
And what are you doing subconsciously, and even fairly directly, you know, you're teaching them to create a positive meaning about those events, which may have been challenging or painful to them.
And this is very important.
Because without that, you know, kids can grow up with all kinds of, you know, terrible thoughts, and they can create quite traumatic or terrible meanings to things that happened.
It can be simple as like, maybe your family moved when they're eight years, you know, eight years old or seven years old or six or five, and moved to a new place and it was kind of difficult for them.
So you write a - you make a book about it or you make several homemade books about it with the pictures and then you can, that can connect to having discussions.
And so now it's part of their history and you can frame it.
You can tell it in a way that teaches them positive values in a positive meaning for them.
You could do of, you know, if you know the history of your own family about your kids' grandparents, or their great -grandparents, or their ancestors.
I want to do this. I'm lucky because my my grandparents—my father's parents—they, before they died, they did a lot of work about the Hogue family history, and they went all the way back to the year, like, 1080.
Something like that.
Just a little bit after 1066, the Norman conquest of England and Scotland too, parts.
So I have this—and they wrote out all this long history, and they're tracing it all the way back, all the ancestors, they visited all these cemeteries and got all these records so I'm lucky a lot of Americans don't have that but since we do I plan to teach that to my kids so of course I could just try to have them memorize it but that's boring instead I'm just gonna make some homemade books about it and we'll talk they'll talk about their ancestors and you know the family history going all the way back to Scotland right and so we have a connection to Scotland that's uh ultimately where As far
back as our family goes actually goes all the way back to Normandy Our family was started by a Norman Baron, I believe and a guy came from Normandy and after the Norman's conquered England and Some of the lowlands of Scotland He came over and to Scotland kind of south of Edinburgh—and started a clan.
And then that's the roots of our family then.
So I can—again, I can make a homemade book all about that.
You could do that too, and it would give your kids a feeling and a sense of their ancestors.
If there's any family trips or vacations you've taken that were really fun or meaningful, and you want the kids to, you know, keep good memories about those things, Because this helps them to strengthen into their memories and to remember these times in their childhood, which they otherwise might forget.
But instead you can create like a, you know, one or more homemade books all about your vacation to wherever.
You went to the beach. So do a homemade book about going to the beach and have, you know, pictures of where hotel you stayed at.
And oh, then you went swimming and anything funny or difficult that happens, you know, you can put it in the book.
And then you give your kids, like, this whole rich family history of their childhood from growing up, or even their family before they were born.
And then again, you can make homemade books about other topics, too, but other than family history, family values, if they're just certain religious values you want to teach them, or you could make a homemade book about it.
Let's say you're...
I don't know. Let's say you're a Christian and you're particularly fond of Saint Francis of Assisi.
You might be able to find some kids books about Saint Francis, but let's say maybe you know if they're too difficult or you don't really like them.
Sometimes it's hard to books, kids' books, that you think are quality?
Well, you just make your own.
Just make your own.
You can pull pictures off the internet.
And you could, you know, do a little research and make your own homemade book about St. Francis.
And connect it to your family and your kids and write it in a way that will be interesting to your kids.
So many possibilities.
You kind of create your own literature based specifically on your family and your kids, and that is so powerful because it hooks them in, and you know, obviously they're interested in these things, because you've connected it to them and their lives and your family.
And then they learn to read without focusing on, you know, memorizing a hundred different complicated phonics rules, without doing a bunch of textbook exercises on here read these three sentences now tell me what is the main idea and you know all that boring school stuff that kills their enjoyment and interest. This will bring their interest alive.
It will make them want to read.
And again you'll have that great, great, great experience as a parent of your child constantly bringing books to you that they want to read together.
I mean, this is your sign.
This is what you're looking for, that you have awakened, or re -awakened, or nurtured, or preserved.
Their natural curiosity, their natural love of learning and desire to learn is when they come to you.
They just walk over to the bookshelf, and they bring you one of their favorite homemade books, or one of their favorite books of any kind, and sit down next to you and put it in your lap and say, Oh, I want to read this one.
And the more they do that, you know you've done a good job.
That's what, that's your measure.
That's your goal. That's what you're looking for.
That's when you know, it's all going well.
And when that's happening, don't worry about any test scores, don't worry about how many words they can read right now, don't worry about how much they're understanding or none of that, just don't worry about it.
Okay, it will work out.
everything will be fine if you keep that natural love of learning alive with them.
If they are bringing you books frequently to read, and they're interested in them and they're enjoying them, whether they're homemade books or other kids books or classics, whatever they are, you're doing great, and it's going to be fine.
They will learn it.
They will. You'll be shocked at how well they learn.
And remember, this Dohman method, this Dohman method has helped kids with fairly severe brain injuries learn to read at quite high, very high levels, meaning age -appropriate level.
The same as kids their same age, with no brain injuries at all.
So kids with serious autism, kids with fairly serious brain injuries of various kinds, and kids with Down syndrome, and they've all learned to read at high levels.
So, if your child is not brain injured, they're definitely going to learn, they're going to be fine.
And in fact, the truth is, eventually, if you just stay consistent, if you just keep doing it, don't give up.
You keep their love of learning, their love of reading alive in this way, they're going to be well above the average.
They will, eventually.
They might not start that way.
Maybe when they're 10 years old, they're, you know, their test scores.
If you're worried about that, it might be lower.
Who cares? Okay. But I guarantee, by the time they hit 14, 15, usually even earlier than that, quite honestly, 12, somewhere in there they are just going to take off and they are going to be one, two, three years or more above the average.
Like so way more advanced.
And then this is compounding, okay, it's kind of like investing, okay?
It's kind of like investing them you invest some money and you get five percent interest Okay, maybe in five years It doesn't seem like much. It's not doesn't seem like it's growing much but With the longer it goes the more you gain Right so we start looking at ten years 15 years 20 years suddenly that investment now It's made you quite a lot of money, and it's that same compounding idea with independent learning and homeschooling, Thomas Jefferson education, the homemade books.
The main thing is you keep that passion for reading and learning and that great curiosity and drive to learn and figure things out and do things on their own.
It pays off, OK? And you might not notice it in just 1 year, 2 years, 3 years.
It might seem like, well, they're little kids, it doesn't seem different than the other kids.
Okay, don't worry about it.
Where you're going to see the difference is when they're 15, when they're 20, when they're 25.
Because at those ages, most of the young adults I've seen, both when I was young, and nowadays, they're kind of dead.
How many 25 -year -olds do you meet now who just have this incredible passion for learning and who are not afraid to make mistakes and who just love, love, love reading and learning and figuring things out on their own?
I don't meet many like that because by age 25 the school systems have destroyed that kind of passion and initiative and self education because the kids have been in school their entire childhoods, just waiting for some adult to tell them what to do all the time.
Taking tests and memorizing, and they don't even know how anymore.
The experience I've had dealing with young people as a teacher, or even trying to help some people as a business mentor, I found it very, very frustrating because I found that most young people, and here I'm talking about young adults, like say 20 years old, 2021, something like that.
Most of them are terrified to make a mistake.
They are terrified to make a decision by themselves.
They want to be told what to do every step of the way.
They're not particularly curious.
They don't just go and figure things out on their own, they wait to be told.
They don't enjoy reading.
They don't just, by themselves, decide to go learn something and then just go do it.
Of course, you can find exceptions, but I'm talking about, you know, the 80 or 90 percent of the population do not do these things.
And it just gets worse as they get older.
30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50 year olds, 57 year olds, people my age, half of them seem mentally dead to me.
Like afraid to do anything new.
Terrified to be seen as being foolish.
Just doing the same thing they've done for the last 30 years.
Kind of sad. So your kids are not going to be like that, they're not going to be like that.
And this is more important now than when you and I were kids because with AI, and with all of the technological changes and just the massive, massive changes that just are happening, so quickly now.
You, me, no one can predict which exact skills our kids will need.
I mean, what skills are going to be useful 15 years from now, 20 years from now?
I don't know. I have no idea.
I do know that a lot of things are gonna disappear.
I know that a lot of skills, a lot of jobs, a lot of careers, even whole industries are going to disappear and be replaced by software robots and AI.
I know that, but I can't tell you exactly which ones or how it's going to work.
And I don't know. nobody knows you can read all the articles you want nobody really knows so what does it mean it means that our kids have to be flexible and creative and great at solving problems and they have to be lifelong independent learners they have to be able to figure things out on their own they got to be able to look at trends, uh, look at what's happening and adapt, change, figure it out.
And they're going to have to be able to see, okay, Hey, I need a new skill.
There's some new skill, right?
Well, you know, maybe it's programming AI, and then you have to just be able to go and learn that on their own, or maybe something totally new that you, you and I cannot predict right now.
They're going to have to able to see that, figure it out and then go do it themselves.
That's how they're going to survive and thrive and do well and do much better than most people.
The people who are trained in schools who have rigid thinking, who are just waiting to be told what to do, are in big trouble.
Because AI and computers and robots are going to replace so, so, so many jobs.
I mean, will people be teaching English like me?
the way I do, will they be teaching English 15 years from now, 20 years from now, probably not probably just AI.
They'll probably be good enough, AI and simulators and lots of other things and that an actual physical English teacher like me won't be needed or wanted.
That's possible. So, I can't teach—and you can't just teach your kids to get good grades in school, doing what they're teaching in school.
They're teaching in school for jobs and careers in a world that existed in the 1940s and 50s.
It doesn't even exist now.
It's already outdated.
15, 20 years from now.
Utterly completely useless.
Okay, I think this is probably one of the biggest arguments for independent education, homeschooling, and specifically this approach, like the Thomas Jefferson education, or just this approach of teaching your kids in a way that's flexible, that preserves their desire to learn and their creativity and their initiative and where it has to come from inside them, you know, maybe you won't get, you know, the short -term benefits to test scores.
You know, if you just try to force them to memorize a bunch of stuff and follow the school system, OK, maybe they'll, you know, get a higher test score on some test but that's not going to help them.
They've got to have that ability and that desire and that motivation and the experience, figuring things out for themselves, learning for themselves, motivating themselves, all of these things vitally important, vitally important.
So, the big picture philosophy in approach is Thomas Jefferson education I discussed yesterday, and then teaching the actual basic skill of reading homemade books and a bit of basic phonics.
That's it. That gives you an educational plan that will work with any kid, because remember, the don't – the homemade books were made for kids with brain injury, so any kid with no brain injury – if your kid has a, basically, healthy brain, it's going to work for them.
It will work. Just be patient and keep doing it.
All right then. Time for me to go play with my kids.
And we've got some more reading to do.
We'll probably . . .
We'll see if I can get them to read a little Aesop today.
I don't know. They're really excited about the zoo -homemade book I made recently.
So, I'll be doing that.
Lots of love to you and .
. . trust me with this.
Trust me with this and do it, okay?
The schools are dead.
That school approach, it's an industrial approach. Okay?
It was created during the industrial revolution.
Do some research about where this school system we have comes from.
It comes from the Prussian System.
There's a great book by John Taylor Gatto called the Underground History of American Education, where he – the whole book discusses the history of this school system we have now, which of course is now everywhere in the world.
This industrial system.
This system of putting kids all in the same grade with the same age and sitting in the little desk in rows, and using these textbooks, and memorizing things, and taking tests in the grades and, okay, all of that is not normal, okay?
It started with the Industrial Revolution.
Okay? It's a factory approach that was not used before that.
And it's no longer useful now.
We are way past the Industrial Revolution.
All right, lots of love to you.
As always, go to EffortlessEnglishClub .com.
Join my courses. See you next time.
Bye for now.
