"Innumeracy" plagues many adults because they never were taught the importance of numbers. The solving of quantitative problems eventually becomes a phobia, and the inability to solve problems injures the development of a person's self confidence and self reliance. Encouraging your child's number sense in a non-threatening and fun way will help to make them lifelong learners who love to solve problems!
Our freebie of templates this week has been developed for educators like our Director and her son's preschool teacher: instructors who think outside the box and who want to discover new ways to utilize simple formats. These teachers recognize that they do not teach their students; they motivate them and teach alongside them. They provide the "spark" for lifelong learning.
There are so many great learning opportunities and teachable moments during the holidays. We align these experiences and "Mini-Units" with our standard based curriculum. Similar to our year-long curriculum, the holiday curriculum is standard based and aligned with Teaching Strategies Gold Objectives. Each activity focuses on one of the objectives in Teaching Strategies Gold: listening, counting, sequencing, reading, beginning sounds, or sorting.
The great thing about the Book Chart is that it is completely customizable to correspond to your child’s learning: the goal, the reward, the activities. Allow your child to be in charge of their learning. We encourage you to start small with your goals. Make the first goal quickly achievable. Eventually, you should make the goals more challenging. Their confidence grows, as they recognize that the goals are achievable.
Before developing the workbooks, we sat down with a teacher from each grade and asked them two questions: 1) What skill-building practice do children need during the summer, and 2) What are some skills that you would like your child to experience before coming into your class?
After listening and learning from our teachers, we created five (5) levels of workbooks: early preschool through second grade.
Basic math and number concepts, utilized in a preschool or kindergarten classroom, set the foundation for learning more advanced math concepts. Early exposure to math and number activities will promote your child’s comfort with these skills. As early exposure to letters and sight words help children feel confident that they are “readers”, early writing opportunities give children confidence that they are “writers”; and exposure to math skills help children feel like they are "mathematicians".
We think numbers and counting are some of the easiest concepts to imbed naturally into almost any activity. Whether you are using our yearlong curriculum or not, we wanted to show you simple ways to integrate counting into your classroom or daily routine.
As we created The Reading Corner curriculum, we sat down as a team and decided which sight words children should know; in what sequence they should be written; and how often we should introduce new words. Literacy Stories follow the Sight Word scope embedded in our yearlong curriculum. The sentence strands get a little longer as the stories develop.
Writing is the glue that cements the mastery of oral language and reading for the child. This is why it is so important that children not only learn to write, but learn to see themselves as writers.
During emergent literacy, children move through a series of stages while they are learning to write. The stages reflect a child's growing knowledge of the conventions of literacy, including letters, sounds and spacing of words within sentences. Almost every interaction in a child's world is preparing them to become a reader and writer. The stages are:
Handwriting is one of the most important skills a young learner needs to master. Because handwriting is a basic tool used in so many areas — taking notes, taking tests, and doing homework — handwriting can have a huge effect on school performance, good OR bad.
By using tweezers to pick up pom pons, children are developing fine motor skills as well as their counting and sorting skills.
Sorting is an important skill for preschool-age children. It is a way to organize and make sense of their world. I just love watching a child wrap their brain around a pile of words, objects or pictures and try to make sense of it. Sorts lend themselves to some great implicit teaching moments. Implicit teaching means we give information or a problem to the child and allow them to come to their own conclusions, make connections, and moving backward into a learning skill.
“I heard of this little bird called The Word Bird. He’s kind of like the leprechaun. He loves to sneak into classrooms and leave a mess of words while having a bit of fun with kids. The Word Bird is a tiny bird with sparkly, light blue feathers, and he has a little red backpack that is filled with words or letters or colors. The Word Bird finds a tiny entrance into classrooms; flies in; grabs some words out of his red backpack; and slaps them all over the classroom as soon as he finds a new classroom of kids to trick. He stays the rest of the year. I went over to the window, and guess what I found?”
How can you make learning fun for your child? In the sandbox! Have some early literacy fun with alphabet find in the sand box. Bury plastic letters of the alphabet and have your child dig them up and tell you what letter they found. It’s a great way for them to learn and fun for parents and children.