Got Milk?

She did it! My 8-month old did her first sign...MILK. At first I thought she was waving, then I started to notice a slight difference. She was actually signing. If you've read my previous post, I've been using Baby Einstein's My First Signs DVD to aide in teaching her how to sign. Well, I'm very proud to see she is taking it on. It's funny because she is so successful at signing MILK, she uses the sign for Milk as signs for other things, like food, more, hungry, thirsty....although she may not use the correct sign, she's beginning to understand how communication works. We are so proud of her we celebrate everytime she uses it!! We can't wait for her to learn more...

Wordless Books

Have you ever been to the bookstore and found a book with nothing but pictures and thought, "well, what's the point of this?". Before teaching, I used think the same thing. Now finding a wordless book seems to be a treasure for me. We have several wordless books at home that we often look at. Not only do they benefit my two boys, but my baby also gets something out of it. These books have nothing but beautiful colorful pictures in them, with NO WORDS! Why would that excite me? There is so much we can do with these books. Instead of me reading them a bedtime story, they can "read" it to me. They can look at the pictures and figure out what the story can be about...and the good thing is, the story doesn't have to be the same each time we "read" it. Because we're not bound to words but only guided by the illustrations, we can use our creative minds to create new stories over and over. It's great. Wordless books are not intimidating, in fact, it promotes an important reading skill...comprehension. Isn't that the reason why we learn to read? To understand what we're reading? Try a couple of these selected books we use at home...and remember to save them for later, they make great writing activities at home. But that's saved for a another blog post.

Go Fish!

My kids and I went to a birthday party and in the goody bags they gave us we found a Go Fish card set. I loved Go Fish. It brings fond memories of my brother and I playing on our family room rug. My 5 year old and I played with his new set on our family room rug. This was his first time playing the game. It's so funny how a simple game can be so complex when trying to explain it. I had to teach him about pairs, about picking from the pot, about how to hold a deck of cards, and about what to say. But out of all that teaching, what I REALLY wanted him to get out of it, was not the actual rules of the game, but the language that is required to play the game..."Do you have a_____?" "No, go fish!" It's so simple but yet complex. Children at this stage have trouble distinguishing between a question and a statement. Haven't you had a time where your child would say "give me this?", and you weren't quite sure if he was asking a question or telling you something? I know I find myself often rephrasing statements into questions for my sons. A game like Go Fish helps distinguish between the two and helps children practice the differences. A question, then a statement, that's what the game is about. What a great way to teach our kids proper grammatical structure....which is what they will often find in the books they will read. Why not prepare our children for the types of language they will encounter when they begin reading. Grab yourself a deck of cards and...Go Fish!

Do You Sign?

I've been wanting to teach my 8 month old baby sign language for a while now. I haven't really gotten a chance to really teach my boys, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to teach all of them so they can communicate with each other. I came across the latest Baby Einsteins's DVD My First Signs, and thought this would be an easy way to teach my daughter. The video goes over basic sign language common for very young children to use. My sons picked up the language pretty fast. They enjoyed signing and showing their baby sister what they've learned. I'm hoping she will begin to pick it up and use it as well. It's so important for her to learn to communicate her thoughts even when her oral language is still developing. Signing would actually fill in the gaps as she continues to develop her language. Could you imagine how easy it would be to know EXACTLY what your child wants simply by using our hands? It's amazing how fast babies, beginning at 6 months, can pick up sign language fairly quickly. As soon as my daughter picks up some of the signs, I will also use books to correspond the sign to the picture in the book. This is a great way to begin introducing vocabulary she will be using in her everyday language as well as read about in books. Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, New Edition is a book I have been reading as well which gives more in depth information about the benefits of teaching sign language to your baby. It's an easy read, something to take along with you when your stuck in a waiting room!

Do you Remember the Memory Game?

My boys and I took a break from all the mini books today and played a memory game. We have the Toy Story version, but any version can be used like The Backyardigans Edition since they are a popular choice. Instead of using all the cards, I took about 10 pairs and mixed them all around. I didn't want to confuse my 3 year-old with so many picture cards that I would just set him up for failure, and he would have a total melt down in the middle of our game. So we played...flipping cards of various pictures. The game has gotten A LOT trickier than when I used to play it as a kid. The pictures were so similiar with only minor details that differ. My boys were pretty good though at noticing the differences. After the game, we counted all the cards we've collected.(My 5 year-old won.) We cleaned up and they were on their way to play with something else.

Practicing prereading skills doesn't have to be painful. It can be as easy as playing a game of Memory. The game helps develop visual discrmination and visual memory skills. What exactly is that? Visual discrimination is noticing differences between objects or what we see. An example, the minute details in pictures,how they are the same and how they are different. Visual memory is remembering what we see with our mind. You might be wondering, how is this important in reading? A big part of learning to read derives from our visual senses. We need to discriminate between pictures and words; and lowercase letters and uppercase letters. We need to learn certain words and keep them in our memory bank for later use. Playing a simple game such as Memory is fun and it gives me an opportunity to bond with my sons, but at the same time they are sharpening their visual skills. (and they don't even know it!)

A-a-Apple

Before my boys attended preschool, we started to make their own ABC books. It sat on the shelf of our office as they were enrolled in preschool collecting dust, until a few days ago. I decided to pull my 3 year-old's ABC book. We went over the pages of the letters he knew. It didn't surprise me that he knew more than the 6 letters he recognized back then. Since attending preschool, he has learned and recognized lots of new letters.

So what I did was add the ones to his ABC book in alphabetical order. I only added 4 new letters at a time. I wrote on one side of the page, "M m" (he recognized both the upper and lower case) and on the other side I gave him a choice of pictures I could draw that started with M; monkey, man, mail. He chose "monkey", and so I drew a picture of a monkey on the other page then he colored it. I had him pick the picture because I wanted him to remember the name of the picture so he could automatically associate it with the letter. I wouldn't have him pick something he was unsure of like "mail" because he could look at it and think it's a picture of a "letter" and that would defeat the purpose of matching the picture to the letter Mm. After coloring, I asked him to point to the uppercase M then the lower case m then the picture of the monkey and say "M-m-monkey". We repeated this process with the other three letters. Over the next few days, I will continue to do this until all the letters he knows are in the ABC book. Each day we will review it, and some days I will open it to random pages to see if he can "read" it. Recognizing letters of the alphabet is an important prereading and prewriting skill. Soon he will know these letters represent sounds and these letters put together make words.

So making an ABC book would not only be a teaching tool, but a resource for any child as he begins to venture into reading and writing. He can use it like a dictionary for letters to refer back to when he can't quite remember what that letter looks like or what that letter might sound like. Learning the alphabets is one of the foundations to prereading. In my article: Are they really ready for reading? I mention other prereading skills and behaviors necessary for reading readiness.

He made the leap!

My 5 year old made the leap into readers! We now have moved from homemade books to published books....this is a HUGE step in his reading progress. With the books we made together, he was able to control them. He controlled the topic. He controlled the illustrations. He controlled the words that were used. Now with these published readers, the control is with the author. (We used the Brand New Readers Red Set) I wanted to see how he would handle a challenge such as this..we started with a book called "The Chase". Before reading the book, I told him what it was about. "It's about a cat named Tabby Cat and he tries to chase things, but they keep getting away." Then we looked at each page as we do, I told him the pattern as he filled in the blank. "Tabby cat chases the ______." He saw a picture of a cat chasing a mouse. He said, "mouse." We looked at each picture and did this until the end of the book. Now why would I tell him what this book is about and give him the pattern of the story? Well, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't. The transition from self-made books to regular published books is very delicate for a child. So even if it's a leap; we still need to keep the safety net there. I need to provide my son enough support for him to feel confident enough to read it. So even if it seems like I'm "telling" him what the book says...he still does the reading work he can control. Like looking at the picture and figure out what's going on, and finding those "anchor" words that he knows so well like "a" and "the". Printed books are very intimidating, and I need to make sure this experience is a good one for him.