Useful Online Education Links – General Education

I have no time to blog today – a major deadline at work, preparing for a business trip. So I will some links that I “swiped” from a WonderBaby article that I stumbled upon using a StumbleUpon.com:

• General Education

1. ABC Teach:
   This is one of the best educational sites on the internet. Flashcards, coloring pages, book report forms, and other fun tools to keep your kids interested in learning.

 

School Express:
Fun activity worksheets you can download and print for free. PLus online jigsaw puzzles, flash cards, awards, and math help.

Dosity.com:
A collection of downloadable worksheets and fun educational games that you can play directly on the site. Our favorite is the Antonyms Memory Game where you have to match words with opposite meanings to reveal a fun picture under the cards.

Ed By Design:
Fun educational games. Learn to write your own story (and publish it online!), play problem solving puzzles, try the Harry Potter trivia, or play number puzzles. (Also known as math problems, but don’t tell your kids that!)

Learning Planet:
Play trivia, wordseach, or other educational games or search their activity database by grade level or subject.

Primary Games:
Great for unit studies. Pick a topic (like holidays, seasons, or planets) and you’ll find tons of games and activities to keep your kids entertained while they learn!

I only tried the first two so far (without my daughter). There is variety of material for each age, but I found School Express extremely unorganized. When I have time, I’ll try to look at them again, pick a couple activities that age appropriate for my daughter and hopefully review them here. Stay tuned

An unplugged infant

A friend of mine who is expecting her firstborn has asked me lately what were Anna’s favorite toys in her first year of life. That brought back memories of her first year and made me go and look at my extensive archive of pictures. I came to realize that we managed quite successfully to keep her mostly “unplugged” for the first year of her life. We didn’t want to buy any toys with batteries, because in my opinion infant toys with batteries are truly obnoxious. They reward any random activity with blinking lights and loud noises. We limited her toy selection to basics – bright balls of various textures, rattles, a couple of soft animals, a couple of cars. But we could never have enough books – we would spend hours every day looking at books, talking about objects in the books, exploring textures in “touch” books. We allocated one cupboard in our kitchen as “Anna’s cabinet” and she could play with its contents – plastic containers, measuring spoons, cups. We also let her crawl on our backyard, get deliciously dirty and touch leaves, rocks, flowers. We didn’t go all the way to “only natural and ultra-green” toys, because in my mind it’s also sort of a marketing ploy. We just tried to keep a sensible middle ground of keeping her anchored in the world around her, and not losing her so early to the electronic allure of modern life.

Learning Everywhere Book

This book has a subtitle: A parent’s guide to early learning at home, in the community and on trips. My husband picked it up at the Barnes & Noble $1 sale, and it was a good find. It groups learning activities into sections, for example, kitchen, bedroom, post office, beach, etc., and it has modifications for younger children. I am always looking for more activities to teach abstract mathematical and space awareness concepts, and this book offers a lot of them. One example is sock matching while sorting laundry. Anna tries to find all the socks – small, medium and large, and then she matches them by color and size. Most of the activities don’t require elaborate preparation, and a lot of them are simple games that we just forget in the middle of dinner preparation or house cleaning. It’s truly about learning by doing, and in my opinion it’s the best way to learn.

Baby Play – Activities for the First Year

Babies learn through play, and parents are natural teachers. A Gymboree baby play book offers a lot of ideas for infant activities, with easy text and bright photos. I bought this book by a recommendation from a friend before Anna was born and tried some of the activities of the book, especially those that didn’t require any store-purchased props. Here is an example of an activity for 6-month old babies that we enjoyed doing:

“Old scarves – the silky kind – can delight and entertain your child up through her preschool years. When she’s still a baby, one of the best games you can play is to poke a brightly colored scarf through one end of a cardboard tube (from a used paper towel or toilet paper) and let him pull it out the other side. Embellish the game by adding your own enticements such as - Where is the scarf? Where did it go? Oh, there it is! Peekaboo! “

By the way, while looking for the graphics on Amazon, I noticed that there is a newer edition now. Here is a link to it, in case anyone is interested – Gymboree Play and Learn: 1001 Fun Activities For Your Baby and Child (Gymboree Play & Music)

Brightly Beaming Preschool Cirriculum

Another resource that came highly recommended to me is Letter of the Week Curriculum. It’s too bad that the site is incomplete, but it has some great information for those interested in a formal homeschooling program starting practically from birth, including reading suggestions for parents, detailed lesson plans, etc. I have to admit that even though I have visited this site for ideas, I could never really get into the flow of “really teaching” my daughter using any sort of a curriculum or a plan. I believe more in the following her natural inclinations by reading very many books on very many subjects and answering her questions as we go. I did like the idea of a scrapbook for learning letters, because in my mind it combines nicely “academics” of memorizing something with artistic element of creating a page. I think we will revisit a scrapbook idea, when we are ready for writing, which I don’t see happening for a couple more years.

Activities to Promote Sound Awareness

Phonetic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes – the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one word from another. A child initially hears spoken language as ideas, or units of meaning. Awareness of separate words, syllables and speech sounds is developing usually at the age of 3-4 and can be helped by playing rhyming games. 

Here are a few activities recommended in Straight Talk About Reading to promote sound awareness:

1. Hearing rhyming words (the simple definition is that words rhyme when all the sounds are the same except the beginning sounds) – say a pair of words, e.g. cat-hat, go-top, and ask your child if they rhyme or not.

2. Sort pictures by initial consonnant sound – have cards with pictures of familiar objects and cards with letters that correspond with initial sounds of the picture cards. Put two letter cards out as column labels. Hand out the picture card one at a time to your child, ask her to name the word and place it into an appropriate column or return it to you if initial sound is not one of the two you selected. You can increase to more columns as your child progresses.

3. Word sharing song. It is sung to the tune of “Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care” (BTW, I have no idea what it is, so I invented my own melody).
The song goes like this:

Do you have a /d/ word to share with me?
Do you have a /d/ word to share with me?
Do you have a /d/ word to share with me?
It must start with the /d/ sound.

The response (from you or your child):
Dog (or whatever) is a word that starts with /d/.
Dog is a word that starts with /d/.
Dog is a word that starts with /d/.
Dog starts with the /d/ sound.