Category — Curriculum

Did you know that reading good quality children’s literature with your newborn or your infant child every single day builds their emergent literacy skills? Many parents fail to realize the impact that book sharing has on the brain development of their precious baby. But research shows time and again that reading for short bits of time every day with your baby gives them a tremendous developmental advantage!

Of course, this leads us to a very good question. What makes for a good baby book? Well, babies need bright pictures, thick sturdy covers that they can hold or chew, simple geometric shapes, few words and lots of rhymes. When looking at a potential purchase or library checkout for your baby, try to find a book that has many or all of these qualities. A great example that I use with my own baby, Allison, and toddler, Ella, is board book version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Penguin Books publishes a very sturdy and small version of this book just for babies and young toddlers. They’ll delight when you read to them about the dining adventures of the little caterpillar as he grows and grows. Point to the pictures and talk about the shapes and colors and things you see there, even though you may feel silly doing so with your newborn or older baby. This helps them to develop both their receptive and expressive language and stimulates their love for learning. You are your child’s first and greatest teacher!

I could not resist including this funny, nostalgic and compelling argument for why Encyclopedia Brown books are still relevant, fun and engaging for the older reader! I just read through the first two Encyclopedia Brown books with our school age classroom, the Arborists, over the summer!  They loved them. For any of you who may not have read these books as a child, Encyclopedia Brown is the son of a police chief who helps his father and the little town of Idaville solve crimes, often over the course of only a few pages. Encyclopedia Brown books contain several short mysteries and invite you, the reader, to offer your thoughts on “who done it” before the culprit is revealed. I love them because they offer clues to the careful reader, stimulate kids’ minds, make book sharing an engaging back-and-forth time for parent and child and are very entertaining! Enjoy Kate’s blog on the pint-sized detective!

From “Kate’s Book Blog“

I’ve just reread the first of Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown books, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, and it is readily apparent to me why I loved these books as a kid, and why kids today continue to embrace them. Here are some of the reasons:

1. Ten-year-old Encyclopedia Brown is an irresistible character. Sobol introduces him thus: “Leroy Brown’s head was like an encyclopedia. It was filled with facts he had learned from books. He was like a complete library walking around in sneakers.” People are always asking him questions. For example, old ladies stop him in the street to ask his assistance with crossword clues. He always knows the answer, but he pauses a moment before offering it up because he’s afraid people won’t like him if he comes off as too smart. When Encyclopedia uses logic to help his Police Chief father to solve a case for the first time, his mother suggests that he could be a detective when he grows up. But Encyclopedia figures there’s no time like the present and he puts out his shingle immediately. He sets up the Brown Detective Agency in his family’s garage, offering his services for 25 cents a day “plus expenses.” Just like that, he transforms what could be a social liability: his intelligence and his bookishness into a source of power, not just for himself, but also in service of other kids who are the targets of local bullies Bugs Meaney and his gang.

2. I don’t like Bug Meaney(he’s a nasty piece of work) but I do like his name, and I like that Encyclopedia has an archenemy with whom he does battle.

3. When you make a habit of besting the biggest bully in town, you need protection, so Encyclopedia acquires as a bodyguard the strongest person in Idaville below the age of twelve. That person? Sally Kimball. But brawny though she is, she’s no bully. She too uses her powers for good, protecting younger, smaller kids from Bugs Meaney, and also, together with a team of fifth-grade girls, devastating Bugs and his gang in a girls-against-the-boys game of softball. And besides her physical toughness and athletic prowess, Sally is also pretty and smart (almost, but not quite smart enough to stump Encyclopedia with a logical puzzle of her own devising). So she becomes not just Encyclopedia’s bodyguard, but also his partner in the detective agency. That’s a lot of stereotypes about girls and their capabilities sent tumbling via the character of Sally Kimball, particularly in 1963 when the book was first published.

4. But the greatest pleasure of the book is, just as I recalled in my previous post, the opportunity to follow the clues and solve the cases (10 contained in each book) alongside Encyclopedia. When his mother asks him, after his first success, how he went about it, he explains: “I got it from a book I read about a great detective and his methods of observation.” This is a nod to Sherlock Holmes, I think. In any event, a combination of close observation and deductive reasoning is certainly the secret of Encyclopedia’s success, and the key to the same for the reader who aspires to solve the cases him or herself before flipping to the back of the book where the solutions are revealed. Some of you know that I’m a lawyer and a law professor. Much is made of the mystical process by which students learn in first year law school how to “think like a lawyer.” On reflection it occurs to me, with apologies to my first year law professors, that I may in fact have received my earliest lessons in how to think like a lawyer from Encyclopedia Brown. At the time I couldn’t have connected Encyclopedia’s brand of logic with the work that lawyers do (I think I may have to credit Nancy Drew with making that connection explicit for me(another current reread). But in all likelihood it would have been in the solving of those puzzles that I first developed the taste and talent for logical reasoning that ultimately led me to pursue a legal career.

I’ll stop there, but stay tuned for a follow up post on Nancy Drew, and possibly a forthcoming law review article: “Learning to Think Like a Lawyer from Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew”. . .

Just a few weeks ago we began a new Lunch and Learn training series from the American Library Association called “Every Child Ready To Read.” It equips teachers from the Infants, Toddlers, Twos and multi-age preschool program with resources and ideas for equipping even our youngest infants with the Six Skills to Get Ready To Read.

There are many things you can do as a parent to help equip your child. You are their greatest teacher! Today, I would like to talk about the first of those Six Skills to Get Ready to Read. It’s called Print Motivation. Print Motivation is a child’s interest in and enjoyment of books. This is a gateway skill. Enjoying and valuing reading books opens children up to a more successful acquisition of the other five reading skills.

I believe that no one left to his own nature, is born disliking books and book sharing. They are “taught” to dislike reading and sharing books by poor modeling and negative experiences with books as children. That’s why it is so important to avoid expecting or asking children to “sit still and listen” when sharing a book with them. It’s crucial to make book sharing fun for both parent and child so that your child is more responsive and attentive and develops a lifelong love of reading.

What else can you do to help develop Print Motivation in your child? Read often and make it fun. Make sure that you and your child are in good moods, so the experience is enjoyable. Stop reading when your child becomes tired or loses interest so that reading does not become tedious or punitive for your child. Choose a book you like and read it in an enthusiastic manner!

Our next book will be about the Second Skill to Get Ready to Read: Vocabulary! We’ll have some more good tips for building this with your child.

For more information please visit www.ala.org/everychild

Why is it difficult for us to understand the value of play?

• Parents perspectives on play vary and are largely based on their own educational experience
• Skeptical of educational innovations that appear trendy or lacking in substance.
  • School is for work; and if you work hard, it can help you get ahead
  • School, in this value system is not for playing around it isn’t viewed as part of the learning process
• In an increasing hostile nations, parents are suspicious of anything that may reduce their child’s competitiveness in the job market.
• Parents have difficulty trusting a teacher from a different background (that they may not have their child’s best interest at heart.

Play contributes to advances in:

• Verbalization
• Vocabulary
• Language comprehension
• Attention span
• Imagination
• Concentration
• Impulse control
• Curiosity
• Problem-solving strategies, cooperation, empathy
• Group participation
• Recent research provides additional evidence of the strong connections between quality of play in preschool years and children’s readiness for school instruction (bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2000; Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2002; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000).
• Research directly links play to children’s ability to master such academic content as literacy and numeracy. Fore example children’s engagement in pretend pay was found to be positively and significantly correlated with such competencies as text comprehension an understanding of the purpose of reading and writing (Roskos & Christie, 2000)

How Play Evolves

1. initially, children are more focused on the actual objects
2. then they focus on the people who use the objects
3. then they develop more complex play with multiple roles and symbolic use of props

Characteristics of mature play

• Imaginary situations
• Multiple role plays
• Clearly defined rules
• Flexible themes
• Language development
• Length of play

“Everyone is born creative;  everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten,” writes Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody And 39 Other Keys to Creativity (New York: Portfolio, 2009).  He continues…

“Then when you hit puberty they take away the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc.  Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creativity bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back please.’

“So you’ve got the itch to do something.  Write a screenplay, start a painting, write a book, turn your recipe for fudge brownies into a proper business, build a better mousetrap, whatever.  You don’t know where the itch came from, it’s almost like it just arrived on your doorstep, uninvited.  Until now you were quite happy holding down a real job, being a regular person.

“…. That wee voice didn’t show up because you decided you need more money, or need to hang out with movie stars.   Your wee voice came back because your soul somehow depends on it.  There’s something you haven’t said, something you haven’t done, some light that needs to be switched on, and it needs to be taken care of.  Now.

“So you have to listen to the wee voice or it will die… taking a big chunk of you along with it.  They’re only crayons.  You didn’t fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?”

I would like to invite you all to our annual Open House and Kindergarten Roundup.  It will be held on Thursday, January 21.  The entire open house is open to all, so even if you have a two-year old, please feel free to visit in our preschool rooms!  This event is open to the public, so we encourage you to invite your friends and families to come out and have some fun!

For more information please download our flier or even call us at 328-ABCD!
http://www.smallblessingsinc.com/news/openhouse2010.pdf

Over the past decade there has been a raging debate in the early childhood field between those who favor accelerated academic instruction and those who favor free play for three, four, and five year olds.  The New York Times Magazine (September 27, 2009) joined in on this debate with an article, “The Make-Believe Solution,” which described a curriculum of organized make-believe play called “Tools of the Mind.”  This curriculum is said to be based on these concepts proposed by Lev Vigotsky in the first quarter of the 20th century:

• At 4 or 5, a child’s ability to play creatively with other children is a better indicator of her future academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her counting skills, or her knowledge of the alphabet.
• Dramatic play is the training ground where children learn to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds.
• In dramatic play children are guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn’t as stimulating and satisfying if players don’t stick to their roles. When children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, they develop important habits of self control.

Time for play in most public kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing, according to three new studies released today by the Alliance for Childhood. Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared from the 268 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied. The studies were conducted by researchers from U.C.L.A., Long Island University, and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Their findings are documented in Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School. The researchers found that:

• On a typical day, kindergartners in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as long being instructed and tested in literacy and math (two to three hours per day) as in free play or “choice time” (30 minutes or less).
• Standardized testing and preparation for tests are now a daily activity in most of the kindergartens studied, despite the fact that the use of most such tests with children under age eight is scientifically invalid and leads to harmful labeling.
• In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.

Child development experts have been raising alarms about the increasingly didactic, test-driven, and joyless course of early childhood education. “These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching,” states the Alliance’s report. “It is increasingly clear that they are compromi sing both children’s health and their long-term prospects for success in school.”

Below you will find a list of possible questions to help you with conversations about your child’s reading. They are not intended to be used all at once or every time you read with your child. Use them at your discretion and where they are appropriate. Happy Reading!!

Questions to ask before you read

• Can you look at the pictures and predict what you think will happen in this book?
• What makes you think that?
• What characters do you think might be in our story?
• Do you think there will be a problem in this story?  Why or why not?
• Does the topic/story relate to you or your family?  How?

Questions to ask during the reading

• What do you think will happen next?
• What can you tell me about the story so far?
• Can you predict how the story will end?
• Why do you think the character did _______?
• What would you have done if you were the character?
• How would you have felt if you were the character? (use different characters)
• As I read ________, it made me picture _______ in my head.  What pictures do you see in your head?
• As you read, what are you wondering about?
• Can you put what you’ve just read in your own words?

Questions to ask after reading

• Can you remember the title?
• In your opinion, was it a good title for this book?  Why or why not?
• Were your predictions about the story correct?
• If there was a problem, how did it get solved?
• What happened because of the problem?
• Why do you think the author wrote this book?
• What is the most important point the author is trying to make in his writing?
• What was your favorite part of the story?
• If you could change one thing in the story, what would it be?
• Can you retell the story in order?
• If you were ____________, how would you have felt?
• What is the most interesting situation in the story?
• Is there a character in the story like you?  How are you alike?
• Why did you like this book?