Children learn best when they’re motivated to make sense of the world around them. They learn on their own terms, at their own pace, and they learn best when they’re trying to make meaning of the world. Although that may sound as though parents, teachers, and caregivers don’t have any role when it comes to children’s learning, that’s far from true. By providing children with stimulating activities full of learning opportunities and taking advantage of teachable moments, parents and caregivers can create an environment in which children learn new skills without even really trying.
When a child begins to read, it can seem as though it happened overnight. One day he’s trying to sound out the words of his favorite book and the next day he’s reading fluently. It may seem that simple, but it’s not. Learning to read is a process that begins from the moment your child starts listening to language.
Though not all children learn the same way, there are some essential skills that contribute to your child becoming a fluent reader. That is, one who can easily read the words on the page as well as make sense of their deeper meaning.
Early reading skills, or prereading skills, as they are sometimes known, don’t really look like reading at all. The simple abilities to rhyme words, to understand that you start reading a book at the front cover, or even being able to recognize the logo of a familiar store are the skills that create a reader.
When your child tells you he wants a certain brand of cereal because he recognizes the box, or that he wants to go to the fast-food restaurant whose sign he sees down the street, he’s “reading” the environmental print around him. When he sings the “Banana Fanna Fo Fanna” song (“The Name Game”) or listens to Dr. Seuss books, he’s practicing phonemic awareness by playing with sounds. When he “reads” you his favorite book until it is so worn the pages are falling out, he’s learning to recognize words by sight.
Those early reading skills bring your child to the next phase of reading, one in which she is ready to start recognizing sight words, begin using word families, and even bring home spelling words to practice. This is an exciting time for readers. Your child will begin slowly and painfully, but as she gains confidence in her ability to read words and learns to go back to correct her mistakes, she will become a more fluent reader.
A fluent reader no longer reads word for word or sounds out every word on the page. Fluent readers can read smoothly, both silently and aloud. Once she’s fluent, your child uses inflection when she reads, can make sense of the text, and is well on her way to becoming a great writer and storyteller.
Your child may have become a fluent reader with the help of a teacher, but he’s going to learn his attitudes about reading from you. If he lives in an environment where he sees people reading, in which there are books, and where you are willing to play word or literacy games, he’s much more likely not to just be good at reading, but interested in it, too.
Learning to write is more complicated than just knowing how to tell a story or using correct punctuation. The process of learning to write actually begins before your child even knows how to read or write words. That’s because writing isn’t just an intellectual skill, it’s a physical one, too.
In order to be able to write, your child needs to be able to hold a pencil correctly, and manipulate it well enough to make the different shapes that make up words. That’s not as easy as it sounds.
If you’ve ever seen your toddler or preschooler color, you’ll notice that she tends to grasp the writing instrument straight up and down in her fist. This limits her ability to move both her hand and the tool, limiting the range of what types of marks she’s able to make on the page. However, that doesn’t mean your child doesn’t begin writing before she can form actual letters. If your child is a reader, she’s probably a writer, too. Many kids will start making uniform scribbles across a page of paper and tell you it’s a story, a list, or people’s names. Don’t disregard her efforts! It means she’s beginning to get a sense of where writing is placed on the page and in what direction it goes.
A concurrent step in the writing process is dictation; that is, having your child tell you a story that you write down, then showing it to her. (In fact, this may be the only time in your child’s life that it’s okay to let her be a dictator!) Your child may be proud of her ability to “squiggle” across the page, but she’s probably frustrated by the inability of those squiggles to tell the stories she has in her head.
Asking parents or caregivers to write down stories serves two functions for your child. It helps her get the story down on paper, and it helps her see what the words of her story looks like. Once you’ve written down what she has to say, you can sit down with her and read it word by word. As you point to the words, she’ll recognize them as her own and take a special interest in what those words look like.
Much like when kids learn to read, as they learn to write there are a whole lot of things going on simultaneously. The next step in the writing process isn’t actually a step at all; it’s a series of learning experiences, the first of which is learning about sight words. From the very first day of kindergarten your child will be introduced to the concept of sight words, words that he’ll gradually be expected to recognize every time he sees them, which is different from learning to sound them out.
Sight words are words so commonly found in books that your child will actually learn to recognize the shape and letters of the word at a glance, learning them without having to sound them out. Once he can read them, he can most likely write them, too.
Still, there will be words your child isn’t able to spell and write correctly, which is where phonics and inventive spelling come in. Though they are similar concepts, they’re not quite the same.
Phonics relies on your child having the ability to match letters to their sounds and is used as a technique to teach reading. Inventive spelling is a similar process, but in writing. Though his sentences may look indecipherable to you, if your child is using his ability to put sounds together to sound out words and assign letters to them, he’s writing.
One of the last steps in the writing process is learning technical skills like grammar, paragraph formatting, genre, and technique. This process starts with your child understanding all the elements of a story. After that he’s ready to move on to learning how different types of writing are used for different purposes. Writing a story, for example, uses a very different format than an essay.
It’s a process that continues to be refined as your child gets older and his ability to comprehend more complex abstract ideas grows. As a parent, you can support this by continually asking him questions about what he’s writing, encouraging him to add detail, and doing some of the activities in this book so he doesn’t feel as though writing is a chore.
Math is a subject that strikes fear in the hearts of kids and parents alike. Kids often complain that math is hard or they’re just “not good at” math, but more children (and parents) are capable of handling math than they think.
Math isn’t just about numbers, and it’s not just found in textbooks. The types of math that kids complain about are often the complicated formulas and math facts that they are expected to memorize. If that’s what your child thinks math is, it’s no wonder she complains about it.
Interestingly enough, your child starts learning math concepts before she even knows what numbers are or what numerals look like. Early math concepts aren’t about number sets, they’re about sorting and patterning, which help to build an understanding of how numbers relate to each other.
Patterns are everywhere in your child’s world. They’re the words of the rhyming books she reads, they’re the stripes on her favorite shirt, and they’re the tiles on the bathroom wall.
Sorting, too, is a part of your child’s everyday life. When she separates her pants from her shirts in her drawers, she’s sorting. When she puts all the green LEGO bricks in one pile and the blue LEGO bricks in another, she’s sorting. She watches you sort laundry, and she sees you sort out groceries as you put them away. All of these daily activities are preparing her to work with numbers.
If math is all around you, it would stand to reason that math would be easy to learn, and fewer kids would have trouble with it. In actuality, it’s often not the math that kids are having trouble with, but learning it. There are a few factors that contribute to kids finding math difficult.
Luckily, as a parent, your job isn’t to choose the curriculum or textbook, it’s to show your child how math can be used in everyday life. From playing card games to cooking with your child, there’s always a way to sneak math into the day.
Like math, science is all around you, too. Science is more than just doing experiments; it is learning how to observe the world around you, learning how to ask questions, finding ways to answer those questions, and then asking more questions to begin the process all over again.
Science is a broad term, encompassing everything from life to technology, making it one of the easiest subjects to introduce to children, because there are so many different branches to learn about. When it comes to the types of science kids explore in elementary school, there are seven main areas:
While that list may sound like an overwhelming number of areas to cover, keep in mind that science as inquiry means your child is exploring the world to find ways to make sense of it. As a parent or caregiver, it’s not your responsibility to know all the answers, just to guide your child in finding them.
On its surface, the subject area of social studies sounds very boring. After all, who wants to spend all that time learning about the past, how to read a map, or about how different types of governments work? Kids—and their parents—might be surprised to learn that those things are only a small part of what is considered to be social studies. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) is working hard to change this view.
As our society continues to grow into one that relies more and more heavily on technology, the world is coming together as one big global community. One day your child could find herself working a project with students or colleagues from all around the globe, without ever leaving her home. It’s important, then, that she has a strong understanding of herself, how to relate to other people, and the history and customs of other cultures.
The NCSS identifies ten major themes of social studies that help kids learn how to live in a global society. Some of the ones your child will learn about include:
Like science, social studies encompass a lot of information. Again, your role in doing activities with your child is not to lecture her about all of these things, but to help her explore new things about herself and the global society in which she lives.