by jennifer hayes
One of the biggest milestones kids experience during the school-age years is learning how to read. Once they unlock those magical words on the page, the whole wide world opens up for them. Whether it’s a lovely story for beginning readers like Frog and Toad or a can’t-put-it-down chapter book series like Harry Potter, both younger and older school-age children have plenty of options when choosing a great children’s book.
But while it’s important for kids to learn to read on their own and to continue to read books by themselves to strengthen their reading skills, it’s also a good idea for parents to keep reading with them, even when kids become strong readers. Here are some reasons why parents and kids should keep reading together:
- It encourages a love of books. When reading is a regular part of your family routine, it becomes a normal thing like eating dinner together or bath time. And the more your child reads with you and sees you reading your own books, the more he’s likely to love diving into a good story, too. When you cultivate a love of books with young children by reading with them, you’re instilling a great habit that’ll last your child a lifetime.
- More book time means less time on screens. When you make reading a built-in part of your schedule, it’ll naturally translate into reducing your child’s screen time. You can also make sure that the time your child does spend using tech devices includes educational content like online math games, which means she’ll have to figure out how to manage her time on a screen (a very useful skill that’ll come in handy as she grows older and has to spend more time on tech devices for academic and social reasons) while reading every day.
- It’s a great opportunity for parents and kids to spend time together and strengthen their relationship. One of the best ways to connect with your child is by opening up a good story. Not only will it be a wonderful way to spend time together and strengthen your bond with your child, but it will also give you a chance to share your reactions and thoughts and opinions about whatever story you’re reading. It will encourage your child to think and to form his own opinions and communicate them. Doing things together with your child is a great way to stay connected, and just as doing active things like bike riding or going for hikes will help him stay physically fit, reading together will help your child become intellectually strong.
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- It helps kids practice reading out loud, which is an important skill. As your child’s reading skills grow, you can take turns reading passages from the book out loud. Doing this will boost your child’s self-confidence and help them becomes used to reading to others, which will be a useful skill in school. Reading aloud also helps kids improve pronunciation, increase their vocabulary, and help them really access and understand the deeper meanings of a story.
- It’s fun. Just because you’re a grownup, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a great kids’ book like the Harry Potter series or The Mysterious Benedict Society series. One of the biggest perqs of reading great kids’ books with your child is that it’s fun. And having fun with your child has benefits that extend beyond bringing you and your child closer together in the present: Research has shown that parents playing and having fun with kids is one of the best ways to increase a child’s chances of being happy and healthy later in life.
Whether your child is a beginning reader or a confident fifth grader who’s mastered chapter books, reading together offers many benefits for both kids and parent
by jennifer hayes
Today April 22, 2015 is Earth Day! Since its inception in 1970, Earth Day has been a great reminder to celebrate the Earth, nature, and more natural living, however you don’t have to wait for Earth Day to start. Make a plan daily to do something to celebrate the Earth’s biodiversity and help towards protecting our amazing planet!
As parents we can set an example for our children. Children learn about strong character when parents and other adults in their daily lives set a good example through their own behavior and actions. Going Green and giving back to the environment starts at home.
If you are looking for ways to go Green today and everyday here are a list of ideas:
Recycle
When you don’t recycle, it goes into the trash, and get buried. It stays there forever, basically.
Recycling and Reusing More Plastics:
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average American produces approximately 1,600 pounds of trash per year. Too much trash going into landfills contains recyclable products that should be going into the recycle bin! Earth Day provides the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the following simple steps for reusing and recycling plastics, helping to conserve resources and protect the environment for future generations.
Find out which plastics are accepted for recycling in your area and where they can be taken. Though recycling varies throughout the country, most community programs collect plastic bottles, and many grocery and retail chains offer bins for recycling used plastic bags.
Bottles: Today, more than 80 percent of U.S. households have access to a recycling program, and the vast majority of them collect plastic bottles. For recycling purposes, a bottle is any container with a neck or an opening that’s smaller than its base. Include the following wherever plastic bottles are recycled:
Milk jugs
Beverage bottles (e.g., water, soft drinks, juice and beer)
Bottles from shampoo, toiletries, laundry detergent and other household cleaners
Salad dressing, cooking oil and condiment bottles
Food jars, such as peanut butter and mayonnaise
Bags: Many grocery and retail stores now offer plastic bag drop-off programs that allow consumers to return their used bags and product wraps to be recycled at collection areas located at the front entrance or near the store checkout. All clean bags labeled #2 (HDPE) or #4 (LLDPE) are recyclable, including:
Grocery bags
Retail bags (remove hard plastic or string handles)
Plastic newspaper bags
Dry cleaning bags (remove paper and hangers)
Bread bags (with crumbs shaken out)
You can also include plastic wraps from products such as paper towels, bathroom paper, napkins and diapers wherever plastic bags are collected for recycling
Visit http://www.plasticbagrecycling.org/ for a list of stores that offer plastic bag recycling in your state. (Click on the “Consumers” tab.)
Bridge the second generation gap. It’s important to remember that recycled plastics go on to become second generation products. Bottles are used to make hundreds of everyday items, ranging from fleece jackets and carpeting to detergent bottles and lumber for outdoor decking. Plastic bags can also be made into many products, including new bags, durable backyard decks, fencing, railing, park benches, picnic tables, and shopping carts.
Make the Green Power Switch:
Global warming and climate change are huge threats to mankind. We’ve made remarkable progress since then in protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment. Your commitment to renewable energy through your Green Power Switch purchase helps us continue this progress. Everyone can battle these with little gestures that bring about big changes for a better future. Switching to renewable energy is considered a prerequisite to protecting our planet. Switch to green power energy today to save the earth and save money.
Eat outside:
In this day and age, we eat in front of the tv or on a short break from the computer. We are plugged in all day, all night, and even at meal times.Take a break from all that. Have a picnic, even if it’s in the local park. Start them young and build that habit when they don’t know any better.
Eat less meat:
Go meatless on Mondays … or Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. Industrial meat and dairy operations are incredibly energy-intensive, from the production of feed to the operation of factories and slaughterhouses, to the processing and shipping. The Environmental Working Group estimates that if everyone in the United States cut out meat one day a week, the greenhouse gas emissions reductions would be like cutting out 91 billion miles of driving.
Learn more about the environment:
Earth Day is a good time to make a commitment to learning more about the environment and how you can help to protect it. Read articles to get up to date on the current issues affecting the environment, like pollution, water shortages, and climate change. Or, learn about a region you’ve never considered before, like the Arctic, the deserts, or the rain forests. Not sure where to start? Check out your local news sources for information about environmental issues in your own backyard.
Understand how climate change works, and what you can do about it.
If you live in a city, look into urban environmental issues like contaminated drinking water and energy conservation.
If you live near a body of water, do research to find out whether it’s healthy or in need of help.
Learn more about fracking, which is affecting many communities in the United States.
Find out which species native to your area are under threat of extinction.
This Earth Day, remember: Helping protect the environment is something we can do everyday. Our earth should be protected so its precious resources can be available to us for many years to come. It is never too early to start teaching children the importance of keeping our planet clean and learning how to reduce, reuse, and recycle. With a little guidance and supervision, kids can get creative helping and celebrating the earth. Just because they are children doesn’t mean they can’t help make a difference. After all, little steps can lead to big changes.
by jennifer hayes
Crosswords for kids help your child to learn about the meaning of words and how to use them in sentences. To solve a crossword puzzle, your child needs to search for alternative words, evaluate word choices and differentiate between homophones (words which sound the same but are spelled differently: i.e. pear and pair). These are all useful skills which help to enhance your child’s vocabulary and reinforce difficult spellings. If your child is struggling with a word, they can turn to a dictionary for help, thereby helping to develop their dictionary skills.
Here are some excellent on-line crosswords for kids created by grade level so that your child can practice spelling words appropriate for their age. I also love these homophone crosswords for kids.
There are plenty of websites which enable you to create your own crosswords for kids. I particularly like this crossword maker at The Teachers Corner.
Recently I decided to make up a crossword to help my children practice difficult spellings. Using lists of words commonly misspelled by primary children (for example, the words marked with an asterisk in this list), I chose twenty words which my children also have difficulty spelling correctly. The words I chose were:
- aunt, bear, beautiful, caught, different, enough, fourth, friend, heard, little, name, people, pretty, school, should, straight, theirs, view, wear, white.
Before attempting the crossword, however, I wanted to give my children a chance to become familiar with the spellings of these words. For this purpose, I created a word search.
Word searches for Kids
Children can solve word search puzzles without paying any particular attention to spelling by just mechanically looking for one letter after another. So if you want to use a word search puzzle as a learning mechanism, it is important to sit with your child while they are doing it and help them to take notice of the spelling patterns of the words they are looking for.
First I created this word search for kids which you can download here or click on the image below.
For this exercise, we started by looking at the word list and grouping the words according to similar attributes or spelling patterns.
First my children identified all the words with double letters (different, little, pretty, school). They started looking for these words first since the double letters made them easier to spot in the grid. Then they looked for words with common vowel letters:
- “ea”: bear, beautiful, heard, wear
- “ou”: enough, fourth, should
- “ie”: friend, view
- “au”: aunt, caught
Finally they looked for the words which didn’t fit with any pattern: name, people, straight, theirs and while.
As my children looked for each word, I made sure they sounded it out and when they found the word they said the word again while tracing the letters with their fingers.
If you want to make your own word search puzzle, you can use this word search maker.
Crosswords for Kids
Now that my children were a bit more familiar with the spelling of these tricky words, it was time for the crossword. I created this crossword for kids which you can download here or click on the image below.
I then asked my children to try to solve the crossword puzzle, reminding them that the answers were all words which they had just found in the word search puzzle. When they struggled to spell a word, I encouraged them to work it out using one of the following strategies:
- I asked them whether they remembered how we had grouped the word in the word search. For example, when struggling to spell little, it helped to remember that we had grouped it with different, pretty and school because it has a double letter.
- We used the Alphabetic Code Chart from Phonics International which lists the phonic sounds with many of their different spelling alternatives. For example, when my son was unsure how to spell the \air\ sound in wear, we looked at the chart and saw that he could choose from -air, -are, -ear or -ere. This helped him work out the correct spelling.
- If the above strategies didn’t work we used the Look-Cover-Write method for memorizing word spellings. My child looked at the word, taking care to notice difficult parts such as double letters, silent letters or unusual vowel combinations. Then we covered the word up and they wrote it on the crossword from memory.
As you can see, crosswords can be a great way to fit in lots of learning moments!
by admin
For Houston children, I know how to read books are just the start of a love of literacy that will benefit your child all through life. Whether you buy more books of your own, borrow them from your local library or get them on loan from friends, putting books in front of your children is the key.
Here are some budget friendly ways to add more books to your child’s home library:
– refresh the books in your home by hosting a book swap with family/friends;
– ask family/friends to give books as gifts for special occasions; or
– look for gently used books at yard sales, Goodwill, library sales, etc.
Most local libraries have children’s sections and many also offer free story hours for little ones. (You can find the public library nearest you here.) Visit the library and let your child pick some books to take home.
Remember to keep books where children can reach them and look at them on their own. A basket on the floor or a low shelf works well.
Read aloud to your children every day and don’t forget to let your child see you reading on your own. Be a reading role model!
by admin
There are a number of things which we, as parents, can do to encourage our children to become good readers.Getting children reading is about always finding new opportunities for them to read, or for you to read to them. One of the main reasons children don’t read more is because they cannot find books they like to read. Help your children find books they love and you are on your way to getting your children reading more.
Motivate your children to read by setting up a reading log or trying this bingo reading activity. Help your children to really understand and engage with books, making connections with the characters, situations and settings. This will increase their enjoyment of books making it all the more likely that they will voluntarily pick up the next book.
Don’t forget to be a good role model also by being seen to read yourself. And do continue to read aloud to your children. Up until the age of 13 or 14 years old children listen on a higher level than they can read. So when you read aloud to children below this age you can read stories with a level of complexity and interest which they would not be able to read on their own.
by admin
Reading to your child regularly early on helps them to develop vocabulary, learn the names and sounds of letters, connect their own experiences to the books you read to them, and learn how books work. We now know that these skills, knowledge and understandings that lead children to be successful readers are developed long before kindergarten starts.
Birth to five is an amazing time in your child’s life! In this period your child’s brain and knowledge grow at a faster rate than they ever will again. You can help your children learn about the world around them and help them make connections between books and their own experience by reading, playing and talking with them. How cool is that?
Help Kids Notice Print
As adults and readers, we encounter text all day every day. In fact, we process text so much we don’t even notice it. Think back on your day…what text did you process today? Email? Stop sign? Recipe? Newspaper? Receipt? Help your child notice the print in your environment, and enrich the print in your environment by trying some of these ideas:
- Make “book looks” the go-to activity between other daily activities or while waiting for something like a doctor’s appointment.
- Play “I spy” a word. See what words your child can find in your home. Encourage the hunting even if your child doesn’t yet recognize the letters or the word. You’re building awareness of print anyway!
- Enrich the words in your home by placing labels on common things like “door”, “table”, “chair”, “window”, etc.
- “Think aloud” about the print you use. Say things like, “I’m going to read this letter,” or “I need to read the map to figure out where we are going.” This models for your child that using and creating text is something important that big people do…and they can too!
Learning about the different ways we use text in our lives is an important part of getting ready to read. Take time to talk about how you are using print throughout the day. This helps your child understand reading is not only about books and reading.
Pointing out road signs? Making a grocery list? Share your favorite way to make your kids aware of the print around them.
