Simple Teaching Tips for your soon to be pre-schooler

1.       Keep it Fun– If your little ones are anything like mine, they LOVE to play! Utilize everyday activities and turn them into teachable moments (i.e. coloring, cleaning, or Family games).

 2.       Make It Relatable– Toddlers see the world as their own; make words that they hear on their favorite cartoons or YouTube channels and turn them into sight words. Slowly but surely, they’ll learn to recognize and read them!

3.       Spend Family Time– Toddlers rarely care what you’re doing as long as you’re doing it together. Learning time should be interactive and include the entire Family if possible… What better way to “kill two birds with one stone” than to spend an hour a day counting, coloring, or reading with your little one(s).

4.       Be Consistent– Although toddlers are absorbent, teaching them to read, write, and count will take time and dedication. Set aside a designated time to sit with your toddlers and implement each of the tips outlined above!

/by

ALPHABET WALL CARDS AND POSTERS FOR PRESCHOOL AND KINDERGARTEN

Sometimes I walk into classrooms that have alphabet posters, and they just kind of sit there all year. And I get it. There are times that we use items just because they are required.

Or sometimes they get forgotten about. I’ve done that myself. It just starts to blend in with the wall.

As someone who only puts the necessities on the wall in my preschool classroom (which is mostly child-made art), I’ve always made sure that an alphabet was up there in some form or another. At times it was because it was required where I worked, but then I also used them when it wasn’t required because I found ways to use alphabet wall cards so that children were asking questions about them and figuring out important literacy skills like phonics.

It is important to expose children to the alphabet because we want them to interact with it and become familiar with these straight and curvy lines that form together as letters. Letters that come together and create words. Words that come together to make sentences. It all begins early on.

I once heard it explained really well. When we read to children, we point to the words so that it gives meaning. This helps them realize that we are not just making up a story. They start to see that we are saying a word written on the page.

Alphabet wall cards with pictures are an extra bonus because it gives children a visual to help them remember the letter sound(s). Whenever we can involve the senses, children will learn more.

Other ways that I love to help children learn the alphabet is with music. We especially love learning the alphabet through the alphabet songs.

If you are singing alphabet songs, pointing out a picture in a visual, holding an object, or moving your body to a letter sound, you are giving children the ability to learn in multiple ways. We also love using hands-on alphabet games and activities.

All children learn differently and some will learn better by seeing, or by doing, or by hearing. I try to remember this first and foremost and incorporate all of these.

/1 Comment/by

What Age Should a Child Know the Alphabet?

As children grow, they naturally hit learning milestones. One of the most critical educational milestones a child must reach is learning the alphabet, which prepares them for reading and writing.

But at what age should a child know the alphabet?

In this article, you will learn at what age a child should know how to recite the alphabet, recognize and write individual letters, learn letter sounds, and eventually learn how to read. Read on to make sure your little one is on the right track!

At What Age Should a Child Know the Alphabet?

Alphabet Recitation

Typically, by the age of three, children should be able to recite the alphabet. However, every child is different. Some toddlers may learn in their twos, and others might not pick it up until the late threes.

Children generally learn how to recite the alphabet through repetition. If you sing the ABC song to your kids often, they are more likely to pick it up quicker, just as they would any song.

Alphabet Recognition

Most children can recognize letters between the ages of three and four. Most kids will recognize the letters in their name first.

For example, a boy named Jace will probably be able to remember what the letter “J” looks like as well as recognize most other letters in his name. Similar to alphabet recitation, use repetition to teach your children about recognizing individual letters. You may ask them, “What letter is that?” whenever you see an isolated letter.

Alphabet Writing

By ages 3 to 4, children will start writing letters. Children will learn to write the alphabet in preschool and kindergarten, but it may be beneficial to have your child practice writing his/her letters at home. Most children at this age know that written symbols represent messages and may be interested in writing on their own. One of the easiest ways children learn how to write letters is to begin tracing them.

Additionally, teaching your child how to write his/her name is an important step that will ultimately help them become familiar with writing the rest of the alphabet.

Sounds of the Alphabet

By 3 years old, children will start to associate letters with their accompanying sounds, otherwise known as phonics. In other words, around the age of five, children should be able to reason that the word “book” starts with the letter B.

Children begin learning phonics in kindergarten, which is a vital step to decoding written text and begin reading.

Reading

By 4 to 5 years old, pre-schoolers through first graders should be able to read words aloud with ease. For the most part, children can recognize sight words and their names. Moreover, children can decode some words by sounding out their letter combinations.

By second grade, a child should be able to sound-out a simple book. By the third grade, your child should be able to read independently and fluently. By this point, your child should be a master of the alphabet and is ready to master the art of reading!

What If Your Child Isn’t Learning at the Rate S/He Should?

It’s important to remember that every child is different and may learn at a different rate. If your child isn’t learning the alphabet at the pace s/he should, one reason may be because s/he isn’t interested or is simply undergoing a minor setback.

However, if your child is falling severely behind, it’s important to find out if your child truly has a problem learning or if it is nothing to worry about. Therefore, work one-on-one with your child to determine if there is a problem. For example, practice reading and writing with your child. If s/he is having a hard time comprehending the instruction or if it’s taking him/her an abnormally long time to do the task, consider talking with your child’s teacher about it.

In the end, if you suspect your child might have a reading or learning disability, discuss it with a doctor. If your child is truly suffering from a reading disability, it can cause him/her to fall behind in his/her education. The sooner you seek help, the sooner you will be able to find a solution that works for your precious little one!

/by

Teaching Kids to Write Correctly

“As you can see, individual differences in writing can be seen as early as kindergarten,” says Cynthia Puranik, associate professor in the College of Education & Human Development. On her computer, she pulls up writing samples from two kindergarteners who were asked to print words that they know. One child manages “hot,” while the second, incredibly, executes “somber, “sarcasum” [sic] and “redundant.”

Despite the achievements of the second child, test results show that most U.S. students struggle to meet grade-level writing standards. Puranik is working to improve children’s performance on the page. She studies the early development of writing skills and how educators can effectively nurture good writers. She received $3 million last year from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to study a writing intervention program she developed in which children help teach one another. We recently spoke with Puranik about the importance of writing and the best way to help children learn to do it well.

 

Your research focuses on how young children learn to write. How early do these skills begin to develop?

If you think about how babies and toddlers learn to talk, they don’t start speaking in full sentences or even full words. They babble, they coo and then eventually you hear the words come out. That’s also what children do in writing. They make marks and scribbles, and those marks evolve in a linear sequence before they start to conventionally write. Children could start doing this as early as two years old.

 

And those are skills that all children must learn before they can write?

Yes, we refer to them as concepts of print. Before children learn to write, they need to understand that print conveys meaning, that writing is symbolic, that writing (at least in English) goes from left to right. These are concepts children have to understand before they can put words together to form sentences. Then they use marks and scribbles to convey meaning. Slowly they learn to write the letters of the alphabet, learn letter-sound correspondences and use that knowledge to spell single words.

Spelling also goes through phases. In the beginning, children spell words using only the first letter of the word, so, for example, a preschool child might spell the word bed with just a b, then later with the first and last letter of the word, bd. Vowels are less salient, and so they are harder for young children.

Very often, children will have grand ideas but they’re not always able to translate that on paper. That’s because children need to be fluent in transcription skills before they can free up enough cognitive resources to be able to convey their ideas on paper.

How does a better understanding of how writing develops translate to better teaching methods?

For one, learning how writing develops can directly inform what to teach and how to teach writing. Also, by learning more about how these skills develop in typical children, we can better serve children with disabilities. A big factor in learning is motivation. Especially with children who have disabilities, you have to find ways to motivate them, and writing can be very motivational on some level because it comes from within. Writing leaves a lasting record. I can show you something I wrote and say, “I did this!”

 

Assessing what makes “good” writing seems like a subjective process. How can teachers effectively evaluate children’s writing?

We do not have good rubrics for assessing writing quality, even for older children. Reading is easier: It’s clear when children make errors when reading, or when they’re reading too slowly. For writing, teachers don’t always know what to evaluate. Is it the amount the child writes? The complexity of the sentences? Whether they can generate ideas versus regurgitate facts? I and other researchers are continuing to refine methods but it is something that needs a lot more study and definitely needs to be emphasized in teacher training.

 

You’ve created an instruction method in which children help teach one another to write. How does it work?

It’s called Peer-Assisted Writing Strategies (PAWS). We have preliminary research to show that it’s effective. There are two theories about how children develop writing skills. The first is called cognitive-linguistic theory, which focuses on the skills required to write. The second is grounded in social-cultural theories, and says children learn how to write in social context, where their development is dependent on opportunities to interact with parents, teachers, friends and others.

/by