Blog-Post Archives

Early Literacy Experiences for Preschoolers

January 21, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Parents are often anxious about their children’s reading skills before they even know all their letters. Preschools vary a great deal in the amount of structured early literacy instruction offered. Some preschools have structured, explicit “letter of the week” type activities and teach each letter in isolation. Other preschools offer a more play based approach–weaving letters and literacy into each activity organically. Regardless of approach, parents still worry about setting the groundwork for reading success in the future. What can parents do to prepare very young children to be successful readers?

Language Development

Exposure to written and verbal language in a variety of contexts can dramatically affect students reading readiness. Ask your child questions when you are on the street, in the grocery store or at the park. Children are constantly wondering about the world around them. Engage them. Ask them what they think about what they see. Take your child to the museum/aquarium/zoo. Rich experiences build a rich vocabulary. Children who have heard words as preschoolers will have a much easier time reading these very same words when they are older.

Read Alouds are Key

Reading books to children opens up an ever broader wealth of vocabulary that may not be present in regular speech. Read books to your children that you loved as a child. Your enthusiasm will be infectious. Read alouds help students learn about story structure, syntax and character. You child will develop an appreciation and love for books that will encourage them to be life-long readers. Even infants respond to pictures and words in books. It’s never too early to start reading to your child!

Focus on Names

The most important word in a child’s vocabulary is his or her name. Children are so excited when they begin to read and write their own names. Encourage your child to practice writing the letters in his or her name. Have your child help sign cards to friends or loved ones. Even a scribble on a card is the beginning stage in learning to write. Point out words that include the same letters contained in their name. Children love words that are similar to their own name. Soon they will begin to notice similar words and they will be pointing them out to you! Once children have mastered reading and writing their own names encourage them to write out names of classmates or family members. Children can learn almost all of the letters in the alphabet, merely by learning their friend’s names!

Games

It is no secret that children love games, and they are a great way to introduce literacy to a young child.

Play hangman with your child. Even if your child is not yet able to figure out an entire word, having them think of and guess letters helps with letter-sound correspondence.
Practice segmenting sounds with your child by asking them to “guess” the word you are sounding out. For example, say the sounds that are in the word “fish” to your child. Make sure you break up the sounds and not the letters(“f-i-sh”). Repeat the sounds until your child is able to blend the sounds together on his/her own and guess the word. It may seem simple to an adult, but young children need to practice pulling apart and pushing together sounds so they can decode words when they start to read.
Write large letters on pieces of paper and have your child jump from letter to letter as you call out names of letters! Practice this same game with just letter sounds.

Our Reading Specialists are happy to work with you and your children to set the groundwork for their future success as readers!

By Joanna Brown, Reading Specialist

Get Into that Body, and Get Ready to Learn!

January 14, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

As most teachers and parents have observed at some point, young children’s bodies can act in ways that are (drastically!) counter to what we think would be best for their learning. Young children are continually exploring and discovering ways that their bodies fit into space and how to feel at ease in their bodies- like trying on clothes that don’t fit right, but you can’t take them off. This process is part of a child’s development. The constantly tapping foot, the drumming pencil, the inability to sit on the meeting rug for any length of time, the consistent tripping and falling– this is far from an exhaustive list, but they are some common actions that are frequently observed in classrooms and at home.

Some adults are quick to dismiss these behaviors as typical childhood “energy,” particularly in young boys. But whether boys or girls, many children grow out of this physical behavior in time, proving that it is a natural, if challenging, period of childhood development. Other children for whom these challenges are more extreme may benefit from from additional support by working with an Occupational Therapist. But regardless of the level of disruption to a child’s learning, there are a number of practices that can be adopted by either teachers or parents to help any child’s body feel more grounded in space when they are particularly “wiggly”.

Create a “Push Place” on the wall at child’s height. Trace a pair of hands on a large piece of paper and post it on a wall in a part of a room where it isn’t distracting. The idea is that the student stands parallel to the wall, places their hands on the chart and pushes hard against the wall, literally doing standing push ups. The joint compression from this exercise can settle a body and make it feel more grounded. Ten to twenty are a good amount for any given visit to the Push Place. After modeling, the child begins to feel what it can do for their body and will self-regulate, recognizing on their own when they might benefit from it.
Give wiggly students something heavy (for them) to carry. It could be a pile of books, a cloth bag full of blocks or any number of other things. If there is a purpose – the objects actually have to be transported somewhere – all the better. If not, it can still be presented to the child simply as body work or exercise or even “getting your body ready to work.” Carrying weighted objects even short distances can, by promoting the exertion of large muscle groups, help a child’s body feel calmed and more ready to focus.
A quick and easy way to help an individual child or a group to warm up before sitting for a while is to do “Handcakes.” For this, the child puts their hands flat together in front of their chest and squash their hands together, squeezing as tight as possible, 10-12 times or about 1 minute. This can be done standing or sitting, and it doesn’t take any special space so can really be used anywhere. The benefits are similar to the Push Place, in which joint compressions stimulate a sense of groundedness that is particularly soothing for children who consistently feel ill at ease in their own bodies.
For sitting, be sure the child has a chair with the proper height. A child’s feet should be able to touch the ground and not swing wildly. Needless to say, and many adults can likewise attest to this, having feet planted firmly is a direct way of feeling grounded in space. When sitting on a rug or on the floor, we can’t assume that all children can sit “criss-cross applesauce” for an extended period of time. Particularly for children with low muscle tone, it is a challenge to hold their bodies upright in any kind of consistent way. One alternative can be to have the child sit half cross-legged, where one leg is stretched out semi-straight and the other leg is crossed. The position can switch legs as needed.

The most important thing when thinking about “body helpers” such as these is for us to remember, again, that young children are still trying on their skin, in a sense. Not only are they growing rapidly, a process during which every added inch and pound creates a real shift, but in addition, a child’s sensory system is still learning how to recognize, interpret and react appropriately to the countless environmental stimuli that we encounter every minute of every day. Supporting young children during this period of growth can happen most effectively when we begin to understand what is driving seemingly frustrating behaviors so that we can begin to address them.

By Kevin Wood, Private Tutor

The Best Ways to Supplement Your Mandarin Chinese Classes

January 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

So you’ve started Mandarin Chinese lessons where you meet with your teacher once or twice a week for a 2-hour class. Your teacher shows you 30 new characters for you to learn, teaching you the stroke order and the pronunciation. Then, your teacher teaches you how to put these characters into a coherent sentence. You spend the rest of your class repeating the words until they are ingrained into your memory. You create sentences of your own, rattling your brain to switch over from English to Chinese. The two hours fly by and the next thing you know, time is up.

Now you are left to your own devices. You go home, glance at your assigned homework and decide to put it off until the following day. You don’t want to forget what you had just learned but you don’t feel like opening your textbook and memorizing the new words, or writing them down over and over. You are at a loss for what to do.

Well, in order to benefit the most from taking Chinese lessons you must immerse yourself as much as possible in Chinese culture.

Like all languages, Mandarin is not only made up of words and sentence patterns, rather it is a rich culture endowed with a very long and old history. The history is full of temples, philosophers, emperors, and cuisine. Learning about the history brings you one step closer to learning the language.

Watch or read movies concerning the history and present social climate of China to pique your interest in all things Chinese. The Blood of Yingzhou District is an Oscar winning documentary chronicling the daunting realities of rural China. Paul Mason wrote a novel, Rare Earth, about the relationship between the West and China. Go and hang out in Flushing for a day and grab a bite to eat at a “hole in the wall” where they have a Chinese and English menu and compare the two. Talk to the waiters that work there and pick their brains.

Buy a Chinese-English dictionary and make the effort to look up everyday words.

If you don’t want to do it old school, there is an app for that: Pleco. This app is not only a live dictionary, you can even snap a picture of the Chinese character and the app will generate the meaning of it. Save your fortune from your fortune cookies that have a Mandarin phrase or word on the back. Soon enough your vocabulary will grow from the meager “ni haos” and “xie xies” to understanding full sentences just by being able to pick out words.

Whatever you decide on doing outside of your Chinese lessons will only help and advance the language learning process. Remember, knowledge is power and knowledge comes in all different shapes and sizes.

By Shuhan Hu, Private Tutor

Building Brain Literacy in Elementary Students

January 7, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Judy Willis, MD
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted November 19, 2013

Practice makes perfect

For many students, the brain isn’t a hot topic of conversation. This is especially true for younger students who are still trying to understand the world around them, and are still far from developing physiological self-awareness of the very thing that gives them that self-awareness.

But helping students develop “brain literacy” doesn’t have to be a matter of dry science pumped full of confusing jargon. Understanding the brain can be empowering for students as they recognize their ability to strengthen it each time they use it. As a teacher, you can emphasize how using the executive functions, both in the classroom and outside of school, increases their strength for academic success. Practice makes perfect!

To reduce anxiety about new “stuff” in the classroom — whether related to Common Core State Standards, struggles with reading, or something else entirely — you can find opportunities to emphasize students’ ability to literally build the brains they want. Remind them that, when they turn in a story, demonstrate a science principle in a skit, or even raise their hand to respond to a question, they grow more dendrites and add new layers of myelin to their axons. To them this may sound gross, but it’s actually good news. By activating these brain networks, they continuously use their executive functions as they apply new learning. Like a muscle, the brain responds to interaction and activity.

Much of this kind of thinking starts with an awareness of the brain itself, and how it functions.

Helping Students Understand Their Brains

One way to help students begin to understand their brains is by explaining specific types of executive functions — or “brain actions.”

You can support this instruction by explaining which executive functions will be activated during a unit, and how. Then invite students to describe the executive functions they believe they activated in the day’s lesson, homework, assessment or even interaction with apps, friends or social networks.
Be specific. Remind them how the math word problem they worked on strengthened their organizing and prioritizing, which resulted in more dendrites in their brain’s connections.
Describe how the multiple types of history documents they evaluated built their networks of reasoning and deduction, and added more myelin to the axons in those brain highways.

Through your words, diagrams and pipe-cleaner representations of the neuroplastic response, students’ confidence in their executive functions will increase, along with their comfort and pleasure in their growing independence and self-awareness.

Building Student “Brain Literacy”

A second grade class could have an “Executive Function of the Week.” After introducing a new function and giving an example, you could invite students to offer their own examples. The emphasis here should not be on a formal definition, but an understanding about how they have applied and increased their capacity.

Other examples for elementary students might include:

Judgment
- What is a fair way to take turns when six students want to play 4-Square, a two-person handball game?
- What do you say when a friend is being mean to another classmate?
- How do you respond differently when a two-year old sibling, a new puppy, or an older brother damages your toy?
- Which library book do you select when you like three and can choose only one?
- How much paint of each color should you take for your table group’s project?
Priority
- Which television programs do you most want to watch for your hour of TV?
- Which of your favorite stuffed animals should you pack for vacation when there is room for only two?
- Should you take full notes during a lecture or jot down key words to fill in later from a book or with a classmate?
Organize
- How do you sort your music on playlists?
- How do you find and sort art materials for others?
- How do you organize your classroom desk materials?
Analyze
- What strategies are best when playing a card or video game (independently and with others)?
- Is something your friend said about monsters in their closet true? How can you find out?
- Which your favorite video games can you complete? Which might be too easy or too hard?
- What does a new word mean based on context clues?
Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility and emotional self-control both support students’ capacity to be more responsive to corrective feedback and learn from mistakes (rather than reacting to them as further evidence of the futility of their effort).
- How do you react when a substitute teacher does things a different way?
- How do you adapt when disappointed by changes in family plans?
- When you don’t get your first choice of the topic you want to write about, how do you find things you like about one of the other choices?

A Growing Awareness

Just as students are aware of the health of their teeth, limbs or senses, they can also develop a recognition of how their brain functions, specifically which executive functions they use and when. This kind of visibility can help students build a powerful awareness of their own thinking patterns, and how “school” and “play” are not always so different at the brain level. It can build confidence, reduce stress, and keep them cognitively primed for learning, while also increasing their “fluency” with very basic neurology — which may not be as crazy as it sounds.

My next blog will examine ways to gradually increase activating executive functions across all levels of academic instruction and assessment. The plan builds upon progressive successes that will reveal students’ incremental progress as they achieve new challenges.

3 Mistakes We Make in Positive Reinforcement

January 6, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

… but don’t worry they are easy to fix!

Ever have a student to whom you are giving positive reinforcement, who just seems to remain completely unmotivated? Have you ever considered whether your rewards just aren’t that rewarding? Highly rewarding and motivating reinforcement does not have to equal a lot of money spent or hours invested if you really know your student, not just as a learner but as a whole person. Here are three things we educators often overlook in trying to motivate our students:

We assume we know what is motivating for a student.

All small kids like bubbles, or candy, or stickers, right? An older student would do anything for a free movie trip, wouldn’t they? Well, that depends.

With younger children we often do find they like certain toys or social games, but we have to check in often to know what their preferences are because they quickly outgrow certain things and want new choices. How do we know? That’s easy, give them some choices! You can offer them different options and see which ones they choose and which they are the most excited about.

With an older child it gets trickier- we assume older students want breaks or trips or pizza lunches. I know when I was in middle school I wouldn’t have cared enough to work for any of those things, but I would have done almost anything to have someone sit and listen to me tell them about Napoleon for 5 minutes.

Now you may be wondering, how in the world would a teacher know that? None of mine did! That is where relationship-building and really knowing your older students is essential. You never know when your student has a quirky interest they are dying to share if someone just showed an interest – and listening is free! So don’t just assume you know what your student of ANY age actually wants – find out for sure!

We forget that people need both short-term and long-term motivators.

So maybe you find out that your student would indeed love a movie trip at the end of a successful semester; however, that is a big reward in terms of time and money, so obviously you can’t do that too often. Sometimes we as educators forget that while our students are working for a big reward that they are going to probably need shorter-term, smaller motivators along the way. The big reward can seem so far away, and the requirements so intense, that without extra incentives along the way it can be impossible to get there.

Adults can benefit the same way. Getting a paycheck may be a main motivator to work and not spend all day sunning on the beach; however, being told that you did a great job on a project helps anyone keep a positive attitude until payday comes. Don’t forget to think about how you can offer smaller rewards for positive behavior, even when students are trying for a bigger goal.

We forget that relationships play a key role in high-quality reinforcement.

If you try to reinforce your students with only items you are quickly going to get frustrated! As your students age, the “things” that will motivate them will likely have to grow in intensity. Let’s say, for example, that a student loves fire trucks. It may start that he or she is willing to work for pictures of trucks, but as they get older and gain skills maybe they will want to be driven to the station to see actual trucks. So then what?

This is where a positive relationship comes in. If you get to know your students well you will learn their interests and passions. If you share an interest with a student, that is hitting the JACKPOT because everyone wants to spend time with someone who shares their interests. The chance to hang out with a person who is legitimately interested in what they do is intensely valuable to a child, and makes doing other work that needs to get done, doable.

I had a student who loved a particular computer game. Turned out that, lucky me, I loved it too. While initially he would work to play the game together (or talk about it with someone who authentically enjoyed it) it turned out later he would complete state standardized tests just so I would listen to the music in his iPod. Because we already shared an interest, he wanted to share other things he loved too. Anyone can work on making sure time spent with students is valuable.

The best part of relationships as reinforcers is that you as a person are dynamic and changing. So while students will get bored with the same jigsaw puzzle, (and potentially need dozens of new ones to stay motivated for a few months) you are able to change and offer new ideas for interesting activities.

When our students are working for things or activities they truly want, and feel that the task is manageable to reach the reward, then there is much they can achieve. It may be a while until some of students are intrinsically motivated, but when they respect you and your opinions, they can get to respecting themselves a little faster. When you see the greatness in your students it helps them to see it too.

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.