I am so excited to be one of the newest contributors at Enchanted Homeschooling Mom. I hope that I can bring some new ideas and inspire homeschoolers to make learning fun for their children. One of my favorite ways to make learning fun at home is incorporating pocket charts and music in our lessons. This month we are going to talk about Pocket Charts and how great they are in a homeschooling classroom.
What is a pocket chart?
Here is one of our pocket charts 
I call this my fancy one because it’s shaped as an apple and Princess (that’s what I call my oldest daughter) loves using it. It’s basically a flat platform with plastic pockets in them where you are able to store words to build sentences. I also have a bigger one that I use for Princess to retell Nursery Rhymes or longer stories.
How can pocket charts make lesson time fun?
As a former teacher I lived by pocket charts. Honestly I think I had a pocket chart for probably everything from keeping track of my students lunch buys to calendar and weather. I also believe that it’s a great and fun tool to use in homeschooling. Pocket Charts are a great way for students to rebuild sentences, poems, and stories you have covered in previous days. The most important aspect is that it makes everything interactive for your child. They get to be apart of the story being built or the Nursery Rhymes being retold.
Here are some ideas on how we use pocket charts at home:
Rhyming Games
Letter Matching (Upper & Lower Case)
Graphing
Nursery Rhymes
Stories and Poems
Calendar & Weather
Building sentences with sight words
Story Sequencing
Building Word Families
Counting
Materials to use and how to store your pocket chart materials:
When I use materials for pocket charts I usually use a printable from one of our curriculums, create my own words using sentence strips or print them out on the computer. You can find sentence strips at any educational store or office supply store. For pictures I either print out clip arts or have Princess cut out pictures from magazines that go along with our story or theme. I love making our own because we laminate them and then organize them in zip block bags. I label each bag with the theme or the story and place them all in a bin. Princess is allowed to use these anytime she likes and uses them often to play teacher with her younger sister
Now lets start creating some fun Pocket Chart activities! Thanks for reading!
Make sure to stop by next month when I share how to incorporate music into Pocket Chart lessons! Thanks for stopping by!
Victoria is mommy of two beautiful little girls and wife to a husband who supports all of her crazy ventures! She is a former teacher, turned entrepreneur, turned homeschooling mom. Now you can find Victoria at ABC Creative Learning blogging about her homeschooling adventure, food allergies, allergy free healthy recipes, and everyday life. She recently also began blogging about product reviews and items she absolutely loves. You can follow Victoria on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.
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