Month: December 2010

Timing for Rhyming

I shared in my post “Why Rhyme?” that rhyming is a tier on the reading ladder because it gives children an awareness of sounds in words – words that sound the same versus words that sound different.
After you start working with them on distinguishing whether words rhyme or not (a listening activity), you will want to help your child listen to a string of rhymes and come up with a new rhyming word that would continue with the same ending sound.  For example, “What is a word that would rhyme with cat, mat, and hat?”  This is a great way for your little one to put into practice their rhyming skills.

But before we do that, I am including an activity that is going to introduce this concept without the “coming up with a new rhyming word” part.  Today, your little one is going to practice the first level skill by identifying which word in the group of rhyming words does not belong.  So your little one will determine if the which words rhymes with the other words (and which one doesn’t).  For example, “Cat, Mat, Sat, shoe?”  Which word doesn’t sound the same at the end of the word?  ________ (shoe)

I wanted to post another activity for rhyme identification so that you can help your little student master the skill before moving on to a more challenging rhyming activity.

Rhyming Match

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Number Guessing Game

I just threw a baby shower for a friend yesterday and it is always a guessing game to estimate how many cards to get for the games, how many petifors, etc. Then there are games where we estimate how many jellybeans there are in a jar, how much toilet paper it would take to wrap around the pregnant woman’s belly, etc.

There are plenty of practical ways we use our estimation skills to problem solve. And that is exactly what we want to start instilling in our kids…problem solving skills.

So in order to work with your child on the beginning concepts of estimating, it is important to understand that until the age of 7 or so children have a hard time developing spatial skills.  This means that they might count out objects, place them into a jar, and then estimate a different number because the number may look greater or less than the number they just counted, depending on how it is arranged.   So understand that the activity we are talking about today is more of a READINESS activity than a formal lesson.

Remember that estimation is just the very best guess we can make based on our evidence.

Here is the activity:

Estimation

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Draw to write

Writing and drawing can be interconnected in many ways. Most of my writing posts incorporate fine motor skill development for 3-5 year olds because their writing skills go hand-in-hand with being able to have control and coordination. The other aspect of writing includes knowledge of formation; putting letters, shapes, and numbers images into their working memory.
Writing ability for a 3-5 year old is not just learning how to write letters, it can also include learning how to draw and put shapes together to make pictures that resemble real life imagery (such as a picture of a person, animal, place, etc.)
So, today’s activity is to start with a circle bear. This teaches your little one familiarity with an everyday shape, but it also teaches them how to use one in illustrations which builds confidence for a young child who is still in the process of acquiring writing and drawing skills.

Circle Bear

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Clap it Out

In the last reading post “Chunks, syllables, and sounds…,” I talked a little about working with your kiddo on breaking down words into parts. This process helps your child start to segment words and one of your goals with your future reader is to have them segment a word into sounds.
So, for now they will “play” with words by breaking a word into syllables like jess-i-ca but later on they will be able to break it down into sounds like /j//e//ss//i//ca/.
Don’t get ahead of yourselves though; they have to master all the pre-reading skills first because there is a sequence of segmenting sounds that I will teach over time.
On that note, we are going to start with listening for syllables in words by clapping along with a word’s “parts” and your child will count on their finger each time you clap. Then you will write that word. You can even extend the activity by asking him/her which word is the longest, shortest, the same number of parts, etc.
Clapping syllables

The answers are: backpack (2), computer (3), book (1), watercolor (4), chalkboard (2)

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What’s in a number?

As discussed in the previous math post, “Number Sense,”  children have to be taught that a number represents a quantity.  When we think about things that come in 4’s we can picture four square, a four-leaf clover, four angles and sides in a square, and other mental pictures as well.  Children don’t have the chance to “picture” anything until we teach them.

So today, we are going make a special book for each number.  That is, this is the activity for today, but I am hoping that you will devote a book to each number, 1-10, over the next 10 days because it will exhaust your child’s attention span to work on all 10 numbers today.

Developmentally, young children can not grasp that a number stays the same when you re-arrange the amount spatially. But, if you want to help them see a number represented in many ways in a book, made with their own hands, this will be a fun place to start.

To prepare:

Grab some paper….I’m not fancy….use what you have: printer paper, loose leaf, construction, you get the picture.  Fold them in half.

You will also need Markers, crayons, colored pencils.

Finally, grab something they can manipulate.  It can even be snacks like goldfish.  I grabbed paper clips simply because it was sitting on my desk. Like I said, I’m not fancy.

1.  Get excited with your child as you ask them to make a number book with you.  “Let’s make a book for the numbers we like to count! What number do you want to make a book for first?”  (Choice is an incentive for most children).

2. After your child has picked a number write it on the front of a folded piece of paper.  If you really want to let them let loose, tell them to write the number a many times as they want on the front cover to “decorate” for you.

3.  Ask them to help you count “that many” objects for your book.

4.  On the left side of the book let them arrange the objects however they want, and then ask them to “record” or write it down exactly the way they arrange it “so that we will remember what it looks like” and then allow them to do that for each page with as many different creations as they come up with.  Staple their book and make sure their name is on the cover 🙂

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