Tot School, Preschool or Kindergarten?

When I started to troll the web in search of fun and educational activities with Anna, I was blown away with the number of great blogs I found. A lot of smart, crafty, spiritual women (sorry, I am yet to found even one blog on the topic written by a man ) put a lot of thought and passion into decisions on how to raise and educate their children. I found a lot of those blogs by stumbling on Tot School – where many families contribute every week and describe how they raise and educate their children under 4 years old. I participate with my other blog, but, honestly, I don’t have any method in my approach. Until very recently, I didn’t do any prep work for any of our “learning sessions”. I don’t have any curriculum or any theme of the week. To be honest, I believe that this finesse is mostly for parents who need structure to their days than for children.Young children learn best through play and attention from adults, and I think that Anna gets enough attention from both parents. In my “teaching” approach I rely most on observing her and following her interests. If she wants to continue to play with Legos while “it’s time to color”, I’ll let her. I am trying to pick books in the library on very different topics – animals, plants, travel, school life – to see what will catch her fancy. Again, it seems too early for her to have any real “passions” – everything is interesting to her.. for the first 10 minutes. The only continuing theme in her life is books – many-many-many books that she wants to read every day.

Unlike many of the blogging moms, I don’t plan to homeschool. Anna already goes to preschool for 2 mornings a week. We will extend it to three once she turns 3 in October. This year she was in the class with 3-5 year olds because of the size of the school and her great language skills. Her teachers were blown away that she was consistently the best in class in all activities that involved “academic subjects” – phonics and math. When I was trying to find suitable  software games for her, nothing under K-level caught her fancy – they were all too boring in their focus on shapes, colors, simple numbers and letters. The book that she is reading in the first picture is this post is Spectrum Math Grade K. I didn’t bring it from the library for her. I wanted to see for myself what is taught on K-level. She grabbed the book, went to her room and said that she wants to play by herself and teach her favorite kitty some numbers. She cannot do all the exercises in this book, but she is frighteningly close to the end of K-level in what she knows in math and language. At the same time – she is completely not interested in writing. Her motor skills were always a little behind, and I am blown away seeing tots under two holding their pencils or even scissors correctly. Anna still cannot do it, even at 32 months. That’s why we are focusing more on crafts now – while I will continue to encourage all her math and language activities (a lot of those are self-led nowadays), I want to bring out her artistic self more and let my intellectual curiosity combine with formidable creative thinking of my husband. Then she will be one very fine young lady indeed

What My Child Is Reading – June 18, 2009

Anna is 2 years 7 months old now. Since materials of the last week proved to be too difficult, I used an advice from other contributors of Well Read Child to look for more age-appropriate books. Unfortunately, this week many books proved to be “too simple” for Anna. For example, she was interested in Mama Cat for the first days, asked to read it 4 or 5 times and then was done with it. I think that she didn’t find the story particularly engaging – she doesn’t seem to be a big fan of animal stories unless they are used as substitutions for people (for example, in Richard Scarry’s books).

The next book was a classic sequel by Eric Carle – Polar Bear Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? Anna liked Brown Bear OK when she was younger. Not her absolute favorite, but she always liked the pages with teacher and children. It was the same with this book – she liked to try to imitate animal sounds, it expanded her vocabulary (and even mine) with new words for animal sounds, but she wasn’t particularly interested after the first two days.

I personally really liked Greg Foley’s book (and checked out another one from the same series yesterday). Anna, however, didn’t get the ending. We read A Very Hungry Caterpillar a zillion times, but she has never seen a real transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. So for her the caterpillar was gone, and a butterfly in the end was a new friend for Bear. I wish we could find some real cocoons, so she could see the cycle of butterfly and not just read about it.

We read other stories by Audrey Wood before, so I picked this one more or less randomly. It was “a miss” in our house. First of all, the whole subject of napping is not exactly a welcome topic in our house. Second, the grandma is ugly – eewww. Finally, Anna didn’t find the story of people and animals piling on top of each other to sleep particularly engaging. I think we read it two times total – a sure sign of rejection here.

Anna and I disagreed on this one. I picked it randomly from the shelf, because I know that she is interested in emergency vehicles. Well, she was. She wanted to read this book every day for many times. But in my mind it’s poorly written, at least for a set under three. On each page Anna wanted to know what happened, and I wasn’t prepared to go into discussions on crime and illegal border crossings. So every time there was a tug of war about this particular book – usually Anna would win and we would read it yet again with me trying to dance around certain topics.

Tada! I am pleased to annouce the winning book of the week! And, again, it comes from our own collection. We got this book as a present from our friend, and she got it at the library sale. The book was hiding behind other books on the top shelf, and my husband unearthed it by accident. Anna took to it right away. I think she finds it especially engaging, because her nickname in our house is Mouse, and she hears, Whose Mouse are you? practically every day. This book also has very simple and sparse text, but unlike Mama Cat, it’s not as repetitive. It was the first book that Anna wanted to “read” by herself and repeated word-for-word in its entirety. I’ll see if I can capture it on the video, it’s pretty fascinating to watch a two year old that appears to read – with proper intonation and turning pages at the right moments. An all-around winner here

G is for Games

Both my husband and I like board games. Since we are both from Europe, we prefer European board games – The Settlers of Catan is my favorite, but we have very many different ones. Of course, they are way too early for Anna, so we started trying toddler board games with her. Hi-Ho Cheery-O was a short-lived hit, but Chutes and Ladders proved to be too long and too confusing. So one day my husband sat at the kitchen table and in ten minutes created a board game for our daughter. We play it together as a family every day now, and everyone has a blast. The game is played with a six-sized dice and with wooden game pieces. There is a musical square – you are supposed to sing a song if you end up there. There are a lot of squares that involve move backward or forward. There is also “hug kitty” square – Anna has a favorite toy and she is very excited when kitty (who sits on the table during the game) gets a hug. And there is a square that requires kissing a player on your right or on your left. It’s simple, but it enforces a lot of concepts – left and right, backward and forward, taking turns, following directions, etc. And the best part is in the end – the winner gets a piece of chocolate and shares it with other players

We also play word games when we are in the car. Because ABC and 123 has “G-related” activities planned, we picked sound guh yesterday. I asked Anna to come up with some words that start with this sound. She volunteered guitar, goat, guest and get, then said that she wants to guess now (of course, at this point I pointed out to her that guess starts with sound guh too). When we play a guessing game, it’s almost like a crossword. I tell her something about the target word, and she is trying to guess what it is. For example, an animal who lives in a jungle, likes bananas, and also lives in a zoo sometimes – gorilla. Someone who comes during Halloween, says Boo! and not real – ghost. Anna really has fun with this game, and I think it extended her vocabulary significantly.

Alphabet Activities with Toddlers

This post is for tomorrow’s discussion at ABC and 123 Picnic. At her ripe old age of 2 years and 7 months Anna knows her ABC pretty well. In fact, her preschool teachers (she goes to the class that has kids age 2-5) has commented to us several times with surprise that she consistently trumps her older classmates in ABC activities. That’s why we don’t really do any targeted “letter-of-the-week” activities outside of occasional discussion of the letters we encounter and the sounds they make. She sort of understands letter-sound correspondence, but it didn’t move her any closer to actual sounding words out yet – when she is not interested in something, she wouldn’t budge. But what we did we do to encourage her interest earlier? Well, here is the short list:

Very early exposure to letter shapes -our nursery decor was based on ABCs. My husband personally selected the fabrics and sewn pillowcases and curtains (I mentioned before that he is the crafty one in our family).

A lot of ABC and word books before she was one - I have described our favorites for that age in my earlier post.

Computer Time - while I don’t believe in educational TV programming (because it’s not interactive), computer is different in my mind, because we play on it together. Even though, all forms of electronic entertainment combined are limited to max of 30 min a day in our house. I cannot say enough about Starfall - we started doing “letter of the day” there (for about 10 min a day) when Anna was about 9 months. I also tried various games with her – the only one that we both liked for a while was Reader Rabbit Playtime.

Tactile activities – playing with foam letters, sticker letters, magnetic letters (we intentionally bought only lowercase, because many parents focus too much on uppercase alphabet) making letters out of play-doh, out of sticks, etc.

As our daughter got older, we progressed to more story-like ABC books like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Dr Seuss’s ABC. However, our favorite ABC book turned out to be this one. I believe firmly that emotional intelligence is as important to young children (and to adults) as knowing their ABCs or learning to read.

Nancy Tafuri books

Our library has a big selection of books by Nancy Tafuri, and both Anna and I enjoy reading them. It’s interesting that Anna can listen to the whole story of The Ugly Duckling and understands the happenings in the story, but she doesn’t connect with that long and sad story emotionally. It’s overwhelming for her to think of a poor little swan duckling that everyone teases. This swan story is very different and very warm, both in its text and its illustrations. That’s my favorite part of Nancy Tafuri’s books – beautiful, detailed, bright illustrations of animal life. The stories are simple, with only a sentence or two on a big page, and Anna “pretends” to read them by herself, since they can be easily memorized. I think the ideal target audience is somewhere between 18 months and 3 years, and eventually we might revisit this books as Anna really learns to read by herself.

You read to me, I’ll read to you

In my efforts of adding more quality poetry to our reading repertoire, I stumbled in my library on this book, and both Anna and I fell in love with it. The stories are funny, easy to understand for a toddler, and the book is beautifully illustrated. I already checked it out twice and plan to buy it eventually. It’s even more fun to read it together – my husband and I did it a couple of times to Anna’s delight. I think she picked up on an idea of dialog reading now and tries to contribute at least part of the rhyme. I highly recommend this book as an addition to your poetry fare.

My baby can read!

I thought this will make a good headline for an April Fools’ post. No, my baby cannot read, even though she can fool you sometimes. She memorized so many books that she can often supply the next word or the next sentence. She can also find the word in the sentence based on the first letter of the word. For example, if we read the sentence, Look at these pretty flowers, I can ask her to point out the word pretty. She will say, ppp… and then look for the word that starts with p. Too bad if the sentence happens to contain two words that start with p – then all bets are off. And she cannot read any word except a few sight words, such as go and stop, when they are taken out of the context, for example, when I draw them on the board. So… no real reading on the horizon, but not too shabby for someone who is not even 2.5 years yet.

Sounds vs. Letters

I think that English language has an easy grammar in comparison to other languages I studied (my native Russian, French, German). However, in my opinion, it more than compensates for simplicity of its grammar with complexity of phonetic rules. The whole idea of the same letter making completely different sounds is hard to grasp, so I am not surprised that so many kids are struggling to read. While traveling the web, I found a great blog – Everyone Can Learn that gives some recommendations on teaching dyslexic children to read. I think those posts are also very applicable to young children.

When thinking about how to introduce the concept of different sounds to Anna, I found this delightful series in our library called “The Sound Box” by Jane Belk Moncure. I brought the story pictured here home. Anna was playing with her magnetic letters, and I told her, Would you like to listen to the story about letter A? Then I read her a book, and she fell in love with it. We read it about 30 times now (it’s her latest “potty” book), and she finds it very entertaining. What I also like about the book that it introduces the idea of a competition in a very simple way. A boy and a girl are looking for words with their sounds, and whoever finds most, wins. Plus, it made Anna actually want to count the words they found – something that she is doing more readily lately. I am sure that some more modern equivalents of this series exist as well – if someone know of any, please leave me a comment

Checklist for parents of toddlers – getting ready to read

I found this checklist following the links from the National Institute of Literacy. How can you help your toddler get ready to read during the ages of 2 and 3.

• I read to my child every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes.
• I encourage my child to bring his favorite books to me, so we can read them together.
• I point to pictures and name them out loud, and I encourage my child  to point to pictures while we read.
• I watch to see if my child sometimes makes eye contact with me when I read aloud. This tells me whether she is playing attention to me and the story.
• I talk with my child throughout the day about things we are doing and things that are happening around us.
• I try to be patient when my child wants to read the same book over and over again.
• I encourage my child to “play” with books – pick them up, flip them from front to back, and turn the pages.
• Sometimes I listen when my child pretends to “read” a book – he holds the book, goes from page to page, and says words, even though they are not the words on the page.
• I give my child crayon and paper, so she can scribble, make pictures, and pretend to write.

Today is Dr Seuss’ Birthday

When I went to Google this morning, I saw its letters dressed as Dr Seuss’ characters and realized that today is Dr Seuss’ Birthday. I have to admit that I have not been a big fan before Anna was born, and even now struggle with some of his works. Perhaps it’s because I am not a native speaker, and my mind really can’t cope well with nonsensical words in a non-native language. However, now when I know more about how young children absorb language, I can appreciate Dr Seuss’ genius a lot more. Why, it’s enough to take a look at some other books for early readers that are excruciatingly boring both for children and for parents. Dr Seuss’ rhymes are catchy and stay in your head for days, no matter how hard you try to get them out. And considering how many of his stories are out there, everyone can find something that he or she likes. I have to say that neither Anna or I are in love with illustrations – I find most of Dr Seuss’ creatures ugly, and it’s hard to decide whether they are animals or people. Can’t you tell that I am an engineer and take everything literally