Preschool Archives

One Quick Tip to Improve Reading Comprehension

July 25, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

One of the reasons I’m qualified to be a test preparation tutor is that I did very well on standardized tests. Some of my skills came from being the best student I could be, others I developed through studying how to take tests. There’s a few “tricks” I learned along the way that helped me and my students improve their scores immensely. The skill I’m going to describe to improve reading comprehension can be developed at any grade level and at any reading level. If you have young kids prepping for the ISEE and SSAT, they can benefit from this advice as much as SAT, ACT, and GRE students.

If you’re interested, read on.

In Reading Comprehension sections of almost every standardized test, a test taker is asked to remark on a specific detail in the text. My problem, and the problem of about 99% of the students I’ve worked with is that we tended to rely on our memories to answer the questions instead of looking back at the text. Despite the fact that I’m a very smart person with a great memory (as are my students), there’s a high probability of error when we examine only the question and do not check the passage to verify. So, the NEW rule is:

Re-SEARCH the passage, do not re-read.

What I mean by Re-SEARCH is that we get familiar with a passage by reading it the first time, so we know where to look to check our answers. It’s not necessary to re-read everything, but it is necessary to do a quick search. My students and I (before I learned my lesson!) lost countless points by using our memories—there’s all kinds of twists and turns test makers add to a passage that can negate the meaning of a phrase and alter the meaning of a question that are almost always resolved through research. I make my students POINT to the exact sentence containing the answer.

If your child is very young, you can start developing this habit by reading with your child and asking them to pinpoint specific facts. One of my students and I would read The New Yorker because it was his father’s favorite magazine (in general, kids tend to be very interested in whatever their parents read). The reading material itself actually doesn’t matter much except that the student needs to be motivated to read the piece (whatever it is) from beginning to end. I’ve had good results reading pulpy fashion magazines and sensational news magazines because keep teens reading because the stories are often about celebrities.

When I work on active reading with a student, we would read and the conversation would go like this:
Grant: “How old is the main character?”
Student: “Sixteen”
Grant: “Ok, show me where it says that specifically.”
Student: (after some searching) “Oh, she’s fourteen, it says right here.”

This is a small skill that sounds like common sense, but common sense is not common practice. If I could pick one skill to cultivate that would help my students the most on this section of tests, I’d pick this one. Re-SEARCH don’t re-read. Pinpoint the exact spot. Verify.

You can do this too! Give your son or daughter something to read. Start with small and go for longer pieces later. As kids get older it’s possible to give them bigger tasks without supervision. Have them point out the last name of the person in the article, ask where the story took place, ask what the name of the main character’s cat is. Have your child locate the facts in the text.

And, like all exercises adjust to more difficult tasks and more specific questions. Also, it can be a great bonding activity to read an article and discuss it with your child—the ideas, the issues, the controversy. You’ll help them and you’ll be spending time talking about ideas that interest you both.

Just throw in the tiny distinction of pointing out the specific location of a fact and you’ll improve reading comprehension (and test scores).

By Grant Bergland, Private Tutor

Literacy Activities on the Streets of New York

July 8, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

New Yorkers, even our youngest children, are no strangers to long walks. With the luxury of having most basic necessities located within close proximity, we travel almost everywhere on foot. Teachers and parents may sometimes find themselves in the presence of a whining child recently weaned of the stroller. “Only three more blocks!” suddenly turns out to be an exhausting and never ending journey. Fortunately, the streets of New York City are a colorful and attractive print-rich environment. When taken advantage of, the streets provide a myriad of learning opportunities for the emergent reader.

Here are some fun literacy activities you can engage with your child to make your neighborhood walk a little less mundane:

Play the ‘I Spy’ Game

Point out things immediately available in the environment using descriptive words and invite your child to guess the object. This indirectly introduces the child to the use of adjectives and develops his/her observation skills.

“I spy, something with my little eye, something that is ___________, ___________, and has a ___________.”
Once the child becomes familiar with the game, encourage him/her to take over. Take turns with the ‘I spy’ game.
Try incorporating phonemic initial sounds as one of the clues. (e.g., I spy, something with my little eye, something that is yellow, has four wheels, and begins with the sound “b.”)

Take Advantage of Storefront Labels

Store signboards are usually attractive and printed in block letters, making the isolated few words predictable and easily recognizable. Most children will walk past the same stores in their neighborhood everyday and this provides great opportunity for repetition. Bring your child’s attention to words that exist repeatedly in the immediate environment.

For example, Starbucks Coffee Company is a New York City staple and is almost inevitably found at every street corner. Read the signboard, “Starbucks Coffee,” as you point your finger from left to right. Get even more personal as you invite your child to read the label from your coffee cup.
Provide variations of the same word in different settings. Have your child spot other stores with the word “coffee.” You can even count them together.
Break Starbucks down into “star” and “bucks” by covering the other section of the word with your hand. This is a great way to introduce the reading strategy of breaking longer words into smaller sections. Try this strategy with neighborhood favorites.

Make Grocery Shopping an Adventure

The neighborhood grocery store is often an enticing sight with its array of bright, colorful fruits and vegetables arranged neatly in rows.

Invite your child to name fruits and vegetables that they recognize. Confirm their observations by pointing at the accompanying labels as you read them out loud.
Talk about the shape, size, color, and even the origin of the produce. How does it feel in your hands? Is it ready to eat?
This is also a great time to introduce an unfamiliar fruit or vegetable. Read the label together and have the food item as part of dinner that night.

Have fun exploring!

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

Why Handwriting is Still Important

June 17, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

A recent article in the New York Times outlines the work of a few scientists who argue that handwriting, an art quickly disappearing from curricula and state standards of education (including the Common Core State Standards) is more important than some realize. Maria Konnikova’s comprehensive article highlights the work of psychologist Karin James, at Indiana University, who has used brain imagery to show that the process of learning how to write by hand might actually help children learn in the long run.

The Experiment

In Dr. James’ experiment, “Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.

The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex. By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.”

In Dr. James’ view, these differences can be attributed to the messiness of learning how to write with free-form handwriting: “not only must we first plan and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.” These variabilities might be a learning tool in themselves. “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”

Possible Explanations

In another study conducted by Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, it was shown that among children in grades two through five, printing, cursive, and typing are all associated with “distinct and separate brain patterns–and each results in a distinct end product.”

Berninger’s result showed that “when the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.”

Takeaways

Even though the importance of handwriting does have detractors–the Common Core, for instance, only requires that children learn handwriting in grades K-1–new research does suggest that the benefits of handwriting extend even beyond childhood and learning how to learn: “For adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may benefit.”

This research has suggested that writing by hand, even for older students, “allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.”

So what does this mean for your child? Encourage your student to leave the laptop at home and write notes by hand: you never know what good it will do.

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

Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes

June 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien, authors of The Straight A Conspiracy
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted March 20, 2014

For the last ten years, we’ve worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they’re struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: “math,” “English” or, in some instances, “school.” Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be their latest exam.

To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating. You spend a huge part of your life grading tests, commenting on essays, and providing thoughtful feedback on homework assignments, only to have them wadded up and ignored. (Yes, students look at their tests, but you shouldn’t harbor any illusion that they look at anything but the red letter grade.) Before writing students off for being ungrateful or lazy, you need to understand why what they’re doing makes perfect sense.

The Science Behind Mistakes

Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn’t just good advice: it’s established science. In the last few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about how people become experts. The main idea, made popular by everyone from author Malcolm Gladwell to rapper Macklemore, is the 10,000-hour rule. Ten thousand is the number of hours it takes to become an expert in almost any field. While it’s wonderful that people are starting to understand how work leads to expertise, the most important part of that research is not how much practice someone needs to perform, but what kind of practice. This latter category is called deliberate practice and involves isolating what’s not working and mastering the difficult area before moving on.

Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. He or she would not play a new piece start-to-finish, fudging through tricky sections and trying to “be done.” That musician stops in trouble spots, figures them out, and then plays that measure over and over again, and only moves on when it’s perfect. The same principle applies to schoolwork.

Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.

So why don’t students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don’t think about their mistakes rationally — they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. “Stupid” is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it’s the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away. Unsurprisingly, that’s the worst move to make if you ever want to get better. Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.

Changing your students’ perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving…it’s every teacher’s dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they’ve likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they’re just not smart. Getting a bad grade feels like a personal attack. No wonder they’re giving the deliverer of those grades the stink eye.

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

To help your students rethink mistakes, help them be specific about their errors. Knowing that answer #3 is wrong doesn’t mean much. Knowing that they didn’t understand mitosis gives them a mandate for getting better. Often, when we go through tests with students, the mistakes they perceive as dire are either careless errors or a single concept applied incorrectly on several questions. Either way, the “fix” is usually smaller than how big the problem feels.

You can also help students view their mistakes as helpful. The red pen isn’t the enemy: when students understand how to deal with errors, red means go. One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they’ve made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.

Mistakes happen for concrete reasons. A student didn’t memorize all the requisite facts, didn’t execute the steps of a process, or perhaps just ignored the directions. The red “X” is just a simple assessment of the actions that student took — actions he or she can easily fix next time. Sharing that clarity and causality with your students is the best way to teach deliberate practice, instill motivation and help them develop a more constructive relationship with mistakes. In short, this creates the class you and your students have always wanted.

STEAM Programs for Everyone

May 22, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

$STEAM Programs$ The media is always talking about STEM Programs–Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics–but why doesn’t anyone talk about STEAM Programs–Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics? In today’s world, where digital creativity and creative thought in general are intrinsic aspects of education and the learning process, it’s important to also focus on the Arts part of this acronym. Creativity helps kids think about what they’re learning in new ways, and can have positive effects on their later lives in the workplace and beyond. This helpful slideshow depicts how teachers and librarians can help focus kids and students on honing their creativity in topics that are not traditionally thought of as creative. This slideshow has suggestions for STEAM programs for students from preschool to high school, and highlights the importance of why creativity should be part of every lesson – not just lessons in the humanities.

STEAM in the Public Library: Programs & Services for Children from Amy Koester

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

One Quick Tip to Improve Reading Comprehension

Re-SEARCH the passage, do not re-read.

Literacy Activities on the Streets of New York

Play the ‘I Spy’ Game

Take Advantage of Storefront Labels

Make Grocery Shopping an Adventure

Have fun exploring!

Why Handwriting is Still Important

The Experiment

Possible Explanations

Takeaways

Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes

The Science Behind Mistakes

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

STEAM Programs for Everyone

Company Overview

School Planning

Private Tutoring

Test Preparation