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Contents
Posts
Ideas to Encourage Your Child to Read
Thursday, November 20th, 2008This week I met with my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher for parent teacher conferences. There was a hand-out for all the parents about ways to encourage your child to read.
Here are some of the ideas I wanted to point out:
-Give magazine subscriptions as gifts (good idea with the December holidays approaching)
-Collect simple recipes and allow your child to cook them. There are some good cookbooks available at the local library for kids.
-Always leave lots of notes for your kids. Put them in their lunch boxes, at different places around the house, etc.
-Play board games that encourage reading.
-Buy your child books about subjects s/he loves – even if it’s something like Barbie dolls or Pokemon. What’s most important is that your child is interested in the subject and wants to read.
-Read classic chapter books to your child at night. Better yet, read them to the whole family. My husband reads books like The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Harry Potter to all of us. We all look forward to this special time together at night.
-Find internet sites and computer games about topics your child enjoys. My son has been interested in the weather since he was in preschool. (He’s in high school now.) He has checked the weather reports online since he was about 3 1/2 years old (no joke!). His interest progressed to reading and learning about the weather on weather related sites.
-If your child is singing a song and doesn’t know all the lyrics, look them up with him/her. Let your child see the lyrics onscreen and try to read them. Every chance you get to have your child read is excellent no matter what the reason.
-Buy your child books s/he’ll enjoy for the holidays.
Some books my kids have liked over the years are:
Captain Underpants Books
Henry and Mudge Series (younger kids)
Five Little Monkeys books by Eileen Christelow
Magic School Bus Books
Eric Carle/Bill Martin Jr Books
Amelia Bedelia
Fancy Nancy
Guinness Book of World Records
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
Harry Potter Books
Roald Dahl’s Books
I-Spy Books
Wizard of Oz Books
Dr. Seuss
Magic Tree House SeriesFeel free to add any good ideas or recommended series in the comments!
-Mama Lisa
Children and Idiomatic Expressions, and a Great New Kids Book
Friday, October 17th, 2008Kids are funny.
My daughter was recently playing on her Gameboy (the handheld gaming system). I said something to her, but she was so absorbed that she completely didn’t hear. So I commented to her friend, who was also there, that my daughter was lost in another world. Her friend asked, “Why? Was she trapped?” I explained that, no, I was just using an expression meaning “when someone is so involved in what they’re doing that they don’t notice anything around them”.
It’s in this type of spirit that the book Butterflies in My Stomach, by Serge Bloch was written. You follow the main character though his first day of school. It’s full of idiomatic expressions that are illustrated literally. For example, the kid has butterflies in his stomach – so there’s an ink drawing of the kid with actual butterflies in his stomach.
Many of these expressions are funny on their own. Children love the expression, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Bloch has a page where cats and dogs are raining down from the sky. It’s a hoot for kids to see this actually illustrated in a book.
The book gives you a chance to discuss these unique expressions with your child, in a funny way.
Multilingual Kids Books on the Web
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008I’ve been asked twice in the past week for free multilingual books.
Here’s a link I found called Books in Multiple Languages. They have English children’s books with translations in Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Romanian, German, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Maori, Greek, Dutch, Farsi (Persian), Afrikaans, Croatian, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Pennsylvania Dutch, Sloven, Indonesian, Malaysian, Hungarian, Dari, Hindi and Filipino.
If anyone knows of any other good multilingual book links, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below.
Someone was also looking for children’s books with animal sounds around the world. There’s one called Who Says a Dog Goes Bow Wow? by Hank de Zutter. You can click the link to see it on Amazon.
-Mama Lisa
Teaching an Appreciation of Poetry to Kids
Monday, November 26th, 2007It’s interesting that in France they have children learn poetry as part of their schooling. Children have to memorize poems. Though difficult, memorization can help develop a special appreciation for poems. This is something that most of my generation in America didn’t really get as part of their general education. I often hear about people in the past from my parents’ generation having had to memorize material like the poetry of Eugene Fields. I think that’s partly why some people from that generation have such fond memories of his poetry.
I’ve noticed my daughter’s teacher is using poetry to teach reading in her first grade class. They read a poem or two a week and copy it into a notebook. I think it’s wonderful that her class is starting grade school with an appreciation for poetry.
One of the poets my daughter’s teacher likes is Douglas Florian. He’s very down-to-earth. Here’s one of his poems from his book called Handsprings:
What I Love About Spring
Trees are growing
Streams are flowing
Cool Spring showers
Blooming flowers
Caterpillars creep
Peepers peep
Playing sports
Wearing shorts
April Fools’
Swimming pools
Going places
Relay races
Days are longer
Sun is stronger
Every morning songbirds sing-
I love nearly everything!
Copyright (c) 2006 by Douglas Florian
I like the earthiness of this poem and I think young kids can relate to that aspect of it too. It’s a nice thing if you can help a child develop an appreciation for poetry. Finding poets and poetry that they can relate to is a step in the right direction.
-Mama Lisa
UPDATE: My original presentation of the lyrics of this poem contained misprints. Douglas Florian was kind enough to correct me.
ABC Phonics Animation
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007The ABC Phonics Parade is my first foray into the world of animation!
We recorded Ms. Lupton’s kindergarten class singing an ABC Phonics Song. Ms. Lupton made up the song herself, to teach the children the sounds of each letter of the alphabet. The kids then drew pictures to go with each letter.
When you click on a letter in the animation, you can hear the children singing about that letter’s sound. When you put the mouse over the letter, you can see a little animation of that letter. When the letter’s simply moving across the screen, you get to see the child’s drawing as it is. That seemed important to me. To let the child’s work stand out.
So here’s the ABC Phonics Parade. I hope you enjoy it!
Press the play button to start. It may take a few moments to begin, particularly if you have a slow internet connection. (You may need a new version of the Flash player to view this video, in which case you should see a link to install it.)
Many thanks to Ms. Lupton and her Kindergarten class of 2007 for creating these fantastic drawings and for singing for us!
-Mama Lisa
Create Your Own Memory Game for your Kids or Students
Saturday, December 9th, 2006Last week my daughter and I had to create a memory game for her homework using blank index cards.
Memory games usually have cards that have images on them. There will be two cards with the same image – so that each image comes in pairs. All of the cards are placed face down, mixed up and put into a grid pattern. You then take turns going. On each player’s turn, you turn over two cards so they’re facing up. If those two cards are a match you take them off the board, and put them in a pile in front of you. If you get a match you go again. If you don’t get a match, it’s the other players turn. You keep taking turns until all the matches are gone. Whoever has the most matches at the end wins.
The game can be played with words as well as pictures. My daughter’s homework assignment was to use blank index cards to make a sight word memory game. The object, of course, was to help her learn some sight words, by playing the game. The words were: a, go, I, love, no, the & you. I had to write each word on two different index cards, so they made matches.
After I prepared it, we played the game. We kept it home and played throughout the week. At the end of the week we sent it into school – so the kids could play there. My daughter can now read all of those words!
I think this is a great idea. It makes a game out of learning. You could use this idea for teaching many different concepts. It could be colors. It could be uppercase letters or lowercase letters. It could be used to teach other words. The list is endless.
My only problem is that my daughter has an excellent visual memory. So when I play memory games with her that have a lot of cards, the competition’s tough, and I often lose! Maybe these memory games are good for adults also – to help us exercise our failing memories!
Rainbow Writing, The Letter “A” and the Excitement Mark!
Friday, October 13th, 2006It’s exciting to watch my 5 year old daughter pick up early reading and writing skills in Kindergarten.
Right now they’re focusing on the letter “A”. How you write it. What it sounds like. What words begin with “A”.
One of the interesting writing exercises they do is called Rainbow Writing. To do Rainbow Writing, the child will trace over a letter that the teacher wrote in marker beforehand, or that’s on a ditto. The kid will trace over the letter 5 different times, using 5 different colored crayons. It gives the letter a colorful rainbow effect, thus making the repetition less tedious.
My daughter’s homework this week was to do Rainbow writing over a capital and lowercase letter A that the teacher wrote in a notebook for her. (Below is my daughter’s homework from last night – I enhanced the colors on the computer so you could see what I mean.)
The other homework my daughter had this week was called the Letter Aa Mystery Bag. She had to find something that begins with the letter A. Then she had to put it in a brown paper bag labeled with an A. Then she had to come up with 3 clues to help the class guess what was in the bag. I wrote the 3 clues down for her and she put the list of clues in the bag. Today the class will figure out together what’s in the bag. (She put a toy ant in her bag. Yuck!)
I thought that was a smart game to make learning fun.
Lastly, my daughter told me yesterday about how she learned about the exciting mark and with her hand in the air she drew an exclamation point! I thought that was a very clever way to explain an exclamation point to a young kid, calling it an exciting or excitement mark!
I’m excited to see what she learns next!
________
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