In honor of Digital Learning Day 2013, we wanted to share some strategies for helping your child acquire the skills to learn online in a safe and healthy way. Read on to learn about digital literacy instruction.
If you’ll recall from our last Reading Essentials post, there are five essential skills your child must learn in order to be proficient in reading. Over the coming weeks, we will be exploring each of these skills in-depth. In this first post, we’ll be discussing the first skill that your child must acquire—phonemic awareness—as well as tips and strategies you can use to support your child along the way to mastery of this skill.
When your child first learns to read, it may seem like magic, but there’s actually a science to the process of reading acquisition. Knowing about the fundamentals of reading instruction can help you support your child as he or she begins the journey to becoming a reading superstar!
This is the question I have been asking myself for the last few months. Before this school year started, I wrote this post about the growing number of families who are opting for educating their children at home rather than sending them off to public school. Ironically, I may soon be joining their ranks. Since I believe that homeschooling is good for some, but not all children, I’m not considering homeschooling all of my school-aged kids, just one.
Typically when we think of the skills required for reading, phonics, phonemes, and blending come to mind. While these specific elements of reading are no doubt important, an even more basic skill is often overlooked—memory! Research has linked working memory to reading comprehension, meaning that the stronger your child’s memory, the more equipped she will be to read fluently and understand what she reads!
Do your kids come home talking about how boring school is? Are you worried that most of what they’re learning is either rote memorization or standardized test material? You’re not alone, and unfortunately, your fears may not be entirely unwarranted.Â
My oldest daughter Kelsey started marching band this year, and she has loved every minute of it—well, almost. If you’re a band parent or if you were in the band yourself, then you know that the typical season starts out with summer band camp—a grueling two-week process in which you attempt to learn the entire show for the season, under the blistering sun no less.
Katie brought home a decodable book from Kindergarten yesterday, and she read the whole entire thing by herself. I was ecstatic! Yes, most of the words were the same, and some of the “words” were actually pictures, but do not think for a moment that this small detail stifled any of my excitement or the pride I felt welling up inside me! I was beaming, and more importantly, so was she!
Any child development expert will tell you that a child’s well-being and his or her capacity for learning are intrinsically linked. From the earliest of ages, children require a basic sense of comfort and security in order for their developing brains to be receptive to other stimuli. Most parents and educators realize this, but what many fail to acknowledge is that this prerequisite for learning continues into childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood! Enter social and emotional learning, a model advocates affectionately refer to as SEL.
Remember clapping syllables as a kid? Did you ever wonder why your teacher had you do it? It turns out that having knowledge of syllables is yet another way for young readers to figure out new words.