SONGS: Baby Bumblebee

Some of you might like to change the ending of this song for your more....literal children :)

How to Say Goodbye

In every child's life, there will be a time when they have to say goodbye to their parents.  It may just be a trip to the grocery store, a date night out for mom and dad, or for some parents, a more routine goodbye as they are dropped off for childcare.  While it's never easy, a healthy goodbye is a skill that children (and parents) need to learn.  Here are some pointers I've put together to help moms and dads make that transition easier.

1.  Prep your child beforehand.  Kids feel more secure when they know what to expect.  If you can check out the place and do a "dry run" ahead of time, do so.  Explain in simple terms why you are leaving them, for how long (even though they can't understand fully) and who will be taking care of them.  If you can, give them a definite time of pick up they can understand, like "right after lunch" or "while you are sleeping."

2.  Be excited about it!  If you get pumped up about Sunday school, a night with Grandma or a new preschool, the will be (more) likely to look forward to it too.

3.  Be brief.  Make your goodbye's simple and quick.  Tell them you love them, you will be back to get them soon, and to have fun.  Then give a big kiss and a hug and walk away!  DO NOT HOVER.  This only makes the child think there is a chance you will take them with you and makes it harder.

4.  Say goodbye.  I have seen parents "sneak out" while their child was engaged in a toy or story.  Can you imagine their fear when they turn around and suddenly mom or dad isn't there anymore? Say goodbye, but make it quick.

5.  Don't "check on" your child five minutes later to make sure they are adjusting.  No matter how sneaky you are, your child will see you, and they will get upset again. If you want to see how they are doing, call or ask another friendly mom to peek into the room for you.

5.  Expect a few tears.  If your kiddo is used to being with you 24/7, being left with someone else , no matter how familiar, can be a scary deal.  Trust me, they will adjust. (And have fun without you! Gasp!)

6.  Be consistent.  If there is a regular place you will be dropping your child off, like Sunday school or preschool or a Moms day out, try to be there at the same time every time.  This goes back to the security in expectations idea.  If your kiddo knows that every Sunday they will go to the same room, they will begin to expect it and transition more easily.

7.  Pick them up when you say you will.  Don't be the schmuck parent that's busy chitchatting while your kiddo is watching all the other kids go home before them.  If you are going to be late, give a call and send a message to your kiddo.  If you pick them up when you say you will, you build trust.  The more trust builds up, the more easily your child will let you go.

Kindergarten Prep: Teach Your Child to Read, Part Three

Pre-Reading

Once your child has a good grasp of letter sounds and the fact that they are the basis for written language, they are probably ready for a beginning introduction to reading.   The next step is showing them how letters connect together to make words.

Reading is, at it's most basic level, two skills. Decoding and memorization.

Decoding: Decoding is the ability to put sounds of letters or groups of letters together in order to "sound out" a word.

Memorization:  Many very common words in the English language do not fit with the rules of phonics, so as readers, we just memorize them  (write, have, does, etc.).  Having a large bank of simple words that your child knows by sight is crucial for their success as readers.  These words are often the building blocks for larger words as well, and will help with decoding. If your child can read at, it's easier to read cat.  If your child can read am, it's easier to read lamb.


Teaching decoding:
Give your child lots of opportunities to put letters together.  Magnet letters, bath tub letters, letter cards, etc.

Play with your child.  Start by spelling their name (or Mom or Dad) and sounding it out.  Put letters together and sound them out slowly.  (Look! I made the word cat!  /c/.../a/..../t/)

Give your child word cards, or just write favorite words that are easy to sound out on index cards.  Have your child match letters to the cards.

While reading together, sound out common words your kiddo likes (cat, dog, etc.)

Don't attempt to sound out words that break any of the rules or use a letter's "other sound" unless your child asks you to.  Keep it simple.

This is one of those "aha" skills.  Your child will get it or they won't.  It will probably take a lot of modeling and you sounding out words over and over before you hear your kiddo start to mimic you with real understanding.  You'll know it when it clicks for them.  It might be at three.  It might not be until the reach kindergarten or first grade.


Teaching Memorization:  Exposure, exposure, exposure.

I bought Maggie a set of sight word cards at Barnes and Noble for $3.  To start, I pulled out the words she sees the most.  Almost every night, we run through the cards. I started off with two, then added more as she memorized them.

These are the ones that we have started with so far:
I, he, she, the, up, is, on, no, to, yes, have

Point out the words when you see them in the world.  Maggie and I will go on word hunts while driving down the road.  We'll search billboards and store signs looking for our sight words.

I point out the words we've talked about in various books, so she gets used to seeing them in different fonts.

Maggie loves to build sentences with her word cards.  She'll tell me "I need up!"  or "I need elephant!"  If the word didn't come with the set, I just write it for her on an index card.

Buy your child some books that are labeled pre-reader, or sometimes, level one.  They will be filled with simple, predictable text, and pictures that give a lot of clues as to what the story is about.  Start out reading the story to them.  Read it again, having your child read the sight words she recognizes.  As your child starts decoding, have them read more and more of the words themselves.  As you see in the video, Maggie likes to match her word cards with the words in the book.

Most reading at the beginning with be memorization.  This is great!  Don't be discouraged.  Being able to remember and recite a story back to you is a key skill for successful reading.

Make it fun, make it a game.  Make it special.  Don't let little brother or sister play with or read the "special" books.  This will make them more intriguing and motivate your reader to spend time in them.

Have fun and go at your child's pace and at their interest level.  Remember, as in everything, children develop differently depending on their interests, genetic code, and environment.  Just try to meet your child where they are and encourage them to develop those skills.  Have a good time and enjoy!

Number Knowledge

In kindergarten, your child will be taught to recognize, write, and order numbers up to 30, as well as be introduced to numbers up to 100.  They will also be taught to add and subtract single digit equations.  One of the most important things they will learn, however, is base ten.

I didn't understand how base ten worked until I got to college and took a class called "Teaching Elementary Math." I had this great aha moment and finally understood why we're supposed to carry the one.  Until then, most problem solving for me had been simply going through the motions.  I didn't "get it."

For those of you who may still be in the same boat, base ten just means that we as humans group things into ten.  Think about how we count.  1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8..9..what's next?  We add another place value and say 10.  1group of ten and 0 ones.  Then we have 1 group of ten and 1 one (11).  Then 1 group of ten and 2 ones (12).  This system works on for infinity.  Every time we get a group of ten, we bundle it together and put it in the next place value.  10 tens makes one hundred.  10 hundreds makes 1 thousand.  And so on...

Why base ten and not base 5 or 6 or 20?  Before there was written language, people used their hands to represent numeric value.  Count your fingers and you've got your answer. I guess it got to hard to bargain for 500 hundred sheep with just the hands so they figured out how to write things down :)

To prepare your child for this, give them lots of experience with numbers.  Base ten is a hard concept.  Don't try to make you 3 year old an expert.  The most exposure they have to how numbers work, however, will give them a great foundation to build upon.

*Read lots of number and counting books.
*Count items around the house.  How many people are in our family?  How many birds to you see?  How many toes do you have?
*Build walls/roads/towers with blocks, ten blocks each.  Count then individually, then count by tens.
*Get an old egg carton.  Label the inside of the egg holders 1-12.  Give your child beans or something similar and see if they can fill each egg holder with the right number of beans.
*Write numerals with a marker on a hard paper.  Have them glue beans, sand, or salt onto the lines.
*Have your child use pipe cleaners (chenille wires) to create different numbers.
*Let your child make a number book.  Staple ten pieces of paper together.  On each page, write a number.  Your child can glue magazine images, draw pictures, or glue precut shapes onto each page to match the number.  If you want it last awhile, use contact paper to laminate the pages (or head to Mardel's).
*Go on a number hunt.  Find one of something in your house, then two, then three...
*Get some goldfish and have your child count them.  How many fish do they have in their ocean?  Tell a story about a big shark (Mom) wanted to gobble up the fish.  Oh no!  The shark came and ate a fish!  How many are left?  Then another big shark named (fill in child's name) came and ate one too!  Now how many are left?Use your imagination and be silly!

Below is an activity Maggie and I did today to count down the days until we leave for Ireland.  We made a chain out of paper, but before we taped it together, she watched me write down the numbers on each piece.  There were 53 links, and as I wrote each number, I said it out loud, emphasized the pattern.  I could tell she caught on  in the teens because she said "fourteen, fiveteen, sixteen."  In the twenties and thirties, I showed her how each number in the ones place grew by one, but the number in the tens place stayed the same.  Exposure, exposure, exposure.  Every night, she'll get to tear one off, which will also let her practice counting backwards!

Author Spotlight: Audrey Wood

Audrey and Don Wood are a husband and wife team that have created some of the best loved books for our preschoolers at my school.  Audrey is the author and Don is the illustrator, so you won't always see them together.  Any book illustrated by Don is beautiful.  His illustration style is often whimsical and has a depth that I really enjoy.

For your todds and up:
The Big Hungry Bear
The Napping House
Quick as a Cricket

For your preschooler:
Silly Sally
Alphabet Adventure
King Bidgood's in the Bathtub....absolutely hysterical.

Enjoy!

Kindergarten Prep: Teach Your Kids to Use Scissors

This is a simple skill that is used a lot in kindergarten, but stay at home moms may not think about it as an activity to do with their own kids. Your child will be using scissors quite often when they get to school, and cutting is usually not the ultimate objective in the activity.  Students will cut out objects and then do something with them, like ordering smallest to largest.  If your child is already proficient with scissors, it will clear the way for other academic objectives.  Plus, kids love to cut.  Preschoolers could spend hours just cutting paper.

Get a pair of kid's safety scissors at your local grocery store ($1.88 last time I checked at Walmart).

Teach them safety rules about the scissors:

1. Stay seated while cutting

2. No running with scissors (ha ha)

3. When passing scissors to other people, hold the blades, not the handle.

About 2 1/2 to 3 is a good time to introduce scissors, depending on your child's development and trustworthiness with potentially sharp objects.

Harder paper is easier to cut, so pick up some construction or scrapbooking paper while you're at Walmart.  

When cutting shapes, kids will try to move their hand around the paper, instead of turning the paper in relation to their hand.  Help them to use one hand to hold the paper and move it as they cut.  

Draw straight, wavy and jagged lines on a paper for them to cut along.  

Let them dig through old magazines and cut out pictures of things they like.  Let them glue the pictures onto paper to make a collage.  You can make color collages, nature collages, animal collages, use your imagination!

The Wonder of Playdough

Play dough is a fabulous thing.  Buy it or make it, roll it or squash it, it is a toy and a tool that can be used for a lot more than just making pretend tacos.  Playdough can be a great way to enhance your child's learning in a lot of different area.  It is a great way to build hand strength and small motor skills.

There are a lot of different ways to learn, through listening, speaking, creating, music, physical movement, etc.  Anytime that children can use two or more different ways to learn an idea, the more quickly and more permanently the information will stick.  Think about how often we use music or hand motions to memorize something.  We are using two different avenues to get the info into our brain, and it works.

So having your child use play dough is a  great way to learn and practice new skills.  Here are some practical ideas that you might like to use with your kids:

Language and Literacy:
Use the play dough to build letters and familiar words.  If your child has trouble rolling and creating the necessary shapes, you can build the parts for them and have them put the pieces together like a puzzle.

Make capital letters and lower case in different colors.

Math:
Make chocolate chip cookies and count how many chips each cookie has.

Make a pizza for everyone in your family.  How many will you need?

Cut your pizza in half to introduce fractions.

Make numbers out of the play dough.  Make small balls of play dough to match the numbers.

Science:

Make familiar bugs.  How many body parts does a spider have?  How many legs?  How about an ant?

We use the top of a large tupperware tub for our workspace.  Even Jack joins in the fun making play dough soup (taste testing and all).

Here is a good recipe for home made play dough.  

Cooked Playdough (flour and salt)

3 cups flour

1.5 cups salt

6 tsp cream of tarter

3 tbsp oil

3 cups water

Dissolve salt in the water. Pour all ingredients into a large pot.  Stir constantly over medium heat until a ball forms by pulling away from the sides.  Knead the dough mixture until the texture matches play dough (1-2 minutes).  Store in a plastic container.