10 'Getting Ready 4 School' Activities for home

School holidays are upon us again!  As usual we can't believe how quickly Term 3 has flown.
It has been an amazing term of learning.  As teachers we love watching our students progress in this term.  A lot of confidence has been gained.
Our students are familiar with the structured learning routine now and have gained confidence in their own ability to complete the tasks. 
The holidays are a good opportunity to enjoy these new skills with your child.  So I thought I would compile 10 easy activities you can try at home:

1.  Rhyme: Share books with your child that enjoy the rhyming sounds.
                                   Our favourite is always Dr. Seuss' 'The Cat in the Hat'

Really any of the Dr. Seuss books are tremendous for reinforcing rhyme sounds.
Usborne books are always great for reinforcing rhyme with books such as 'The Fat Cat on the Mat and other tales' Phil Roxbec Cox and Stephen Cartwright 

 Mem Fox is always a fantastic choice for rhyming books (especially great as she is an Australian author!)

Where is the Green Sheep?  10 Little Fingers, 10 Little Toes, A Giraffe in the Bath, Possum Magic, Boo to a Goose and The Magic Hat are all books that feature throughout our program and may be stories that your children are familiar with

There are many other great options that you can access.  When you are enjoying the book with your child- make sure you reinforce the rhyme sound.  Are they able to continue the rhyme by changing the beginning sound of the words.  ie. cat/hat/mat/fat/pat/sat/rat etc.


2.  Nursery Rhymes and Finger play songs:
There is a reason that these songs/rhymes have stood the test of time.  They teach early literacy skills while the children are having fun!  It is easy to assume that your child might be tired of these, but if you revisit them during these holidays, you will probably find they love singing these with you.

3.  Fairy Tales:  these holidays are a great time to talk about some Fairy Tales with your child.  It is surprising that a lot of children start Kindergarten without knowing fairy tales.  You could take some time to enjoy this.

4.  I spy: this is a great game especially if you are spending time travelling a bit of distance.  A great way to reinforce the beginning sound in words - remember at this stage, it is best to refer to the sound instead of the letter name, ie. I spy with my little eye.....something beginning with /t/ (rather than saying the letter name T)

5.  Make your own book: This is a fun activity.  You could choose to make an alphabet book - revising all of the letters that we have learnt this year: amstifdroglhucbnkve.  Children can draw pictures, or find photos on the internet that start with these letter sounds.

6.  Reading with Understanding (Comprehension): As always, enjoy sharing books with your child.  Now is a good time to start to develop some comprehension strategies.  Comprehension is essential for reading competence and is often a reading skill that is not taught at this age.  In our School Readiness classes we reflect on comprehension, so reading at home is an ideal time to build on this skill. 

• make connections- how does that make you feel?, how would you feel if you were that character?  has this ever happened to you?  does this remind you of something? how is this different to what you do?.........
• question - I wonder why they are doing that?  I wonder what is in the lunchbox?  I wonder where they are going? .........
• predicting - make a prediction to work out where the text is leading to.  Predicting assists with reading skills. 
• review - the text.  Talk about what has happened in the story, what was the sequence of events

Of course, at this age reading for enjoyment is very important.   You should not try to incorporate all of these comprehension strategies into every book that you share with your child.  Use some of

the strategies as best suited to the text you are reading.

7.  Fine Motor Fun:  Throughout our program we spend time each week developing the children's fine motor skills through playdough, cutting, shaving cream, ripping paper, threading and art/craft activities including painting, gluing and stamping. 

During the school holidays you might like to work on some of these strategies with your child as well. 
 

Shaving Cream Play

 

Gluing

Stamping

Scissor Skills

Playdough creation

Playing with tongs

Threading

 8.  Writing Practice:  Now that our students are doing so well with their name writing.  They could practice writing their name on their own and forming the letters independently.  Our program will introduce surname writing to the Ready 4 School students in Term 4.

 8.  Numbers: Offer your child opportunities to count. 
Shopping for fruit and vegetables is a great activity for reinforcing counting skills.  Ask your child to gather 5 pears, 4 apples, 3 bananas, 10 carrots etc.
You could extend this activity by creating a fruit book at home.  Each fruit or vegetable can be drawn and the corresponding numeral written with it. For example: 1 banana, 2 apples, 3 pears, 4 oranges etc. 
Try this worksheet for some extra number practice:

  9.  Play: Give your child lots of opportunities to play during these school holidays.  Play is the basis of all good learning at this early age.  Make sure your children enjoy play opportunities such as gross motor (play equipment at the park is perfect for this), make believe and construction play is so important.  Play with your child when you get the chance.  Role play how to speak with each other, how to share and take turns.  These skills are invaluable when your child reaches school.

Have a great time and play with your child, as well as making arrangements for play opportunities with children at the same age.  Some of our school readiness students have organised play dates with their class friends during these holidays, a fantastic chance to work with your children on these essential play skills!

Dress up and Role Play

Construction Play

   10.  Relax and Have Fun: School holidays are meant for FUN.  Allow your family to relax and enjoy these two weeks.  Precious time with your family is the best educational experience for your child.  Happy, confident children need time to enjoy themselves and relax in their own environment. 

We are so proud of our clever students.  We hope that you all have a fantastic holiday, we look forward to working with you next term

For the Love of Learning

Donna

 

Learning Numerals the ED Specially 4U way

Using the ED Specially 4U number cards- www.edspecially4u.com.au, allows our students so many interesting learning opportunities.  We have a strong philosophy of 'hands on' learning using concrete objects.  These activities are enhanced through the use of our number cards.

Numeral flashcards 1-20 use our unique ED Specially 4U colour system.  Each numeral has been given it's own colour which is then used throughout all of our numeracy resources.  Students are able to use the additional colour cue for visual reinforcement of the number.  This set also includes numbers on a white background, so that the learning programs can gradually fade the use of the colour cue.

First step to learning numerals with ED Specially 4U:  

We introduce the numerals by matching

(for the parents of our School Readiness Program, this is particularly well used in our 'Learn 4 School' classes as the initial step to numeracy acquisition)

Step 2, 

to consolidate the students skills and ensure they have formed understanding of the numerals 1-10

PLAY GAMES AND HAVE FUN WITH NUMERALS
this part of learning about numerals is SOOOOO FUN

The 1-10 memory match game is lots of fun to reinforce the numeral learning.  We play this game at this point by only matching the numeral cards to the numeral cards.  Kids love to try to find the MOST pairs!!

Step 3: REINFORCE NUMERALS USING SONGS

Who doesn't enjoy singing these songs and reinforcing our numerals at the same time!

5 Little Ducks

6 Little Ducks

5 Little Speckled Frogs

 

5 Cheeky Monkeys

5 Red Apples

10 in the Bed

A small look at teaching teen numerals at our 'Ready 4 School', school readiness program

We believe in explicitly teaching the numerals to develop a deeper understanding of numbers 

'from the beginning'

Thank you to Ms Victoria and the Wednesday morning School Readiness Class

 

  

Step 4: SEQUENCING

Using the number cards we are able to teach sequencing skills of the numerals

This fun sequencing game - TRAIN SEQUENCING, is very popular in our classes
Children enjoy putting the velcro numerals into the correct sequence for  
                                                       numerals 1-20

                                                    
 FORMING NUMERALS
              To introduce our students to writing numerals we do lots of fine motor preparation.
Students use playdough to strengthen their fingers and create a hands on numeral experience

These clever people were able to copy the numerals 1-10 using the numeral cards as a model.
They then use the fine motor cards to practice writing the numerals

Don't forget the fabulous sensory activity of shaving cream writing

and numeral stamping

When our students are able to correctly recognise and name the numerals it is great fun to add the 'Dinosaur Number Bingo' game to our teaching

http://www.edspecially4u.com.au/shop/123-4-me/number-games/

We love extending our numeral knowledge by using the 'Number Smart Mat' by Smart Kids to reinforce numerals 1-30
  (photo from the product)

There are so many great activities to reinforce numeral skill development.  We believe in using as many hands on/concrete learning materials as possible, however we also believe in consolidating our students' learning with worksheet reinforcement.  This blog is only a brief overview of ways that we teach numerals, and we will speak later about how we teach number concepts of counting with one to one correspondence, and counting to a given number group, as well as how we teach the deeper understanding of numerals and number groups .....(again just to name a few) but that is for another blog.......... Don't forget to visit the website www.edspecially4u.com.au to view all of our products to teach numeral recognition.

I hope you have enjoyed reading how we develop our students skills
 

For the Love of Learning

Donna

Incy Wincy Spider

'Learn 4 School' with Incy Wincy

One of the FUN 'Learn 4 School' themes this term has been 'INCY WINCY SPIDER'.

We have a great time exploring nursery rhymes at 'Learn 4 School'.  So much great learning is achieved through a nursery rhyme.

A very important part of our learning program is the development of 'Phonemic Awareness'.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS is essential for reading competence.  The student needs to be able hear the individual sounds or 'phonemes' that words are made up of.  They also need to manipulate these sounds and hear rhyme and syllables.  They need to manipulate the sounds in words, for example: /mat/ into /pat/.  The children need to break apart the sounds in words and hear that words are made up of different phonemes.

We use our Nursery Rhyme as the basis for this program.

As a class we sing/read the nursery rhyme with actions to ensure that the students know the structure of this rhyme.


We then break the nursery rhyme into it's verses, and present this using both the corresponding graphic from our resource and the written words.

While reinforcing the rhyme with this resource, we give great attention to hearing the rhyme sound in each of these verses.

At the completion of using the graphic and words resource, we discuss the sequence of the rhyme with the students.  We offer the graphic only cards to the students in dis-ordered array to re-order the rhyme.

This resource also comes with the verses in written text only, we don't use this with the students in the 'Learn 4 School' class, but this is a great extension for students who are working at the higher level.

While we teach the nursery rhyme, we are reinforcing rhyme and sequence.  We are also able to reinforce the students skill to manipulate the consonant at the beginning of the rhyming word.  We use the rhyme flashcards to practice hearing rime family words.

Students love learning through nursery rhymes.  They are a fantastic phonemic awareness teaching tool as they are usually an already known literature source.

When we have completed all of the nursery rhymes in our Nursery Rhyme set - Incy Wincy Spider, Hickory Dickory Dock, Humpty Dumpty, Hey Diddle Diddle and Little Miss Muffet, we then increase the students phonemic awareness skills by playing the nursery rhyme games.

Rhyme Grid Bingo

This is an easy matching game where students can practice their turn taking skills as well as their rhyme matching.

Find the Rhyme Bingo

The students have to have higher rhyming skills for this game, as they have to decide if the card they are using is a match to the rhyme on their baseboard.

Memory Match

This game requires the students to independently find the words that match using the 'memory match' format.

All of these colourful hands-on learning resources are available fully prepared: http://www.edspecially4u.com.au/shop/abc-4-me/phonemic-awareness/


This structured and sequential program is just one of the fun ways that we explore this well loved nursery rhyme.  The children love our craft and hands on learning activities that include fine motor skills and number skills of position, counting with one to one correspondence, and numeral recognition.  The 'Learn 4 School' program develops the foundation skills necessary to establish

the LOVE of LEARNING

       Donna

Read with Me!

As everyone who knows me well, knows; I am like most teachers you will meet that have a firm belief in reading with your child.  Research supports that we should read to our children from 'before they are born'.
Reading teaches so many important things, that it is often hard to compile a list without leaving some out.  So, I will endeavour  to list my TOP 10 reasons that reading aloud is important for our children:

1. FOR ENJOYMENT - children love to hear a story, and the message that you send when you are reading is one of love and happiness. 

2. BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE to assist children to better understand the world around them for example: reading about a teddy bear, coupled with a graphic of a teddy bear assists your child to see their own teddy bear in relation to the world.  This is a simplistic analogy for little children, but it is the start of developing your child's background knowledge or deeper understanding.

3. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT the more language children are exposed to, the better their understanding and grasp of language will be.  Children learn language through modelling and reading is a great activity to develop language and vocabulary  (note this differs from speech development)

4. SPEECH DEVELOPMENT this is also developed by hearing speech patterns of others.  Reading speech offers a different pattern to spoken speech (usually a narrative in the younger years).  Speech articulation is also taught through the modelling of speech sounds and patterns.

5. PHONEMIC AWARENESS the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of language.  This is learnt through reading experiences, especially through rhyme and rhythm.  (Developing good phonemic awareness skills in children is a real passion of mine and you will encounter this topic several times in my upcoming blogs!)

6. REPETITION children learn best when they hear something more than one time.  Sharing a book together allows you the opportunity to re-read favourite books over and over and over and over SIGH, usually to the exhaustion of the reader, but this is extremely important for the child who is listening and learning from that story and language

7. SEQUENCES  Children need to be able to sequence.  We follow sequences and routines in all of our everyday life and structured learning.  Hearing a story and being able to place the storyline into a sequence teaches our children the ability to understanding the routines that we have to follow, as well as making those important brain connections.

8.ATTENTION SPAN AND LISTENING Children who are able to sit and listen to a story will always achieve to a higher extent in structured education.  Increasing the length of the book and your child's motivation to listen to the story will assist them when they start their formal education - they have already developed the ability to attend to an activity!


9.  Reading aloud exposes your child to different TEXT TYPES AND WRITING GENRES.  This enables your child to speak in 'reading language' as well as having a story and print knowledge that they will draw upon throughout their life long learning

10. For the LOVE of Learning:
Choose a special time each day to cuddle up with your child.  Your child will love the cuddles, and love the one on one time that this busy world often does not provide us with.  Together you will share funny, sad, exciting, adventurous and interesting stories that will cement your child's love of literature, love of reading and love of learning

OK, now I felt that I needed to narrow this to the top 10.  There are more bullet points that I could add to this, however, I believe these are the most important.  Please feel free to share with me any of these or other skills that you believe are the most important reasons for reading aloud to a child.  As parents, it is often SOOOO hard to find those precious moments to read with your child, however, it is equally important as it is difficult.  Try to set aside time each day to READ READ READ,

For the LOVE of LEARNING

Donna