Practicing in the Car

Part of the reason that practicing in the car can be effective is that car trips are of a limited duration.  Kids know that it’s going to be over when the trip is over.  So they seem to be able to focus and get some of that boring drill practice over with.

Making Car Practice Successful

• Keep it short
• Pay attention to your child’s mood
• Make it a routine to practice while driving
• Involve singing or chanting, if possible
• Turn practice into a game
• Provide reinforcement and rewards
• Take turns or practice with your child
• Don’t just listen; you participate, too
• Practice different things throughout the week
• Keep flash cards in the car
• Keep oral reading books in the car

Things to Practice in the Car
Names:  Help your child learn his full name, how to spell his name, and the full names of both parents. Use daily repetition for a few days and then periodically do a little “Facts About Me” quizz on names, phone numbers, address, etc. to make sure that your child is maintaining the information.

Phone Numbers: For safety reasons, the first phone number your child should learn is the one that is most likely to get her in contact with a parent (or parent-figure). Once you’re confident your child knows that number, you may want to add in a back-up phone number. Also, it may be wise to start out teaching your child the ten-digit phone number even if that is not required in your area. We have to reteach our kiddos ten-digit numbers by next summer.

Address: I chose to teach our children our address using single digit numbers. For example, I taught them our house number as “one two five six” instead of “twelve fifty-six.” I did this for safety reasons. They are more easily understood by others who may need to know their address and Emergency Operators (9-1-1) are trained to use this format to help prevent miscommunication.

Seasons of the Year, Months of the Year, Days of the Week, Child’s Birthday: I know little songs that teach these concepts. You can usually find examples online. If you ask nicely, maybe I’ll get around to making a video of the kids and me singing for you.

Flash Cards: You can make or buy inexpensive flash cards to teach colors, shapes, numbers, letter names and sight words. Let your child hold the deck and practice while you drive.

Quizzing: Do little quiz-style activities for colors, shapes, counting, rhyming, and letter sounds: What color is your shirt? What does the letter “A” say? What rhymes with “ball”? How many toys are in your car seat? Playing “I Spy” also reinforces color and shape concepts. Quizzing can also be used to teach opposites and synonyms, simple blending (C-A-T), spelling words, vocabulary words, foreign language vocabulary, math facts, states & capitals, and many other assignments. This often works better if you and your child take turns being the “asker.”

Chanting: Chanting is the method I used to teach rote counting (1, 2, 3, 4), ordinal counting (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th), skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s, and saying the alphabet. This can also be an excellent way to work on memorizing parts for programs or presentations.

Storytelling: Ask your child about her day. Prompt with “What happened first, next, last?” if you need to. You can also ask her to tell you the story of a book she read or a movie she watched. Sometimes it’s fun to retell memories of fun activities with friends and family.

Oral Reading: If you keep a few books in the car, this can be a great time for your son to read out loud to you.

What else can we teach our kids while driving around town?  Leave a comment below and share!

Tags: drill, early elementary, homework, preschool

Board Games with Preschoolers

Skills Children Learn While Playing Games

• Sharing and turn-taking
• Basic social skills such as conversing and staying focused on a social interaction
• Winning and losing with grace
• Making decisions for beginning strategy and learning consequences
• Early counting, color and shape recognition, and other cognitive skills

Tips to Make it More Successful

• Team up with a parent while learning the rules
• For card games, have children lay all the cards down face up in front of them
• Teach children how to win (strategy) in addition to basic rules
• Support decision making and strategy
• Insist on turn taking as much as possible
• Help winning children realize that it was their “turn” to win
• Help losing children realize they’ll get a “turn” to win if they keep playing
• Emphasize that the goal is to have fun to playing together
• Play together regularly!

Games We Love

What games does your family love?  Leave a comment and share a recommendation or a tip to make playing together fun for everyone.

Tags: fine motor skills, preschool

Making a Morning Schedule

A daily organizer is usually best used by children who are at least beginning to read. Keep the words as simple as possible. If you’re willing to be your child’s “reader,” this list will also work. But, if you’re looking for independence, try a picture chart instead. These organizers are designed to be checked off with a star or a sticker and work best if your child chooses a reward that is available for completing the chart. Be careful about making perfection the standard for the reward. This can be very frustrating for some children and defeat your purposes.

Picture card schedules are commonly used with special needs children who have communication difficulties. But clearly they work for preschoolers who are still learning to read. Several subscription-based or for-purchase services are available, but when I did this, I was looking for FREE picture cards! You can go through the various categories and find pictures to represent the things your child needs to do in the morning. Under “Food” you’ll find a breakfast picture, a backpack is available in the “School” category, etc. Yes, it was a a bit wasteful to print out a page of pictures and only use one or two, but my kids used up the scrap paper. So, less guilt there. My kids enjoyed coloring the pictures, while I explained what they were. Then we laminated them. Actually, I used packing tape to laminate them, but maybe you’re up for more than I was. Post the pictures somwhere prominent in your kitchen or your child’s room using velcro or magnets. As a task is completed, your child can move the picture to another spot on the wall or put it in a small basket, etc.

Giving your child a simple list of morning activities, adds to her growing sense of independence and competence. It develops a sense of responsibility and helps your child see how his actions contribute to the the family’s success in the morning. Finally, remember schedules are most successful when they are both consistent and flexible. Tricky, but true.

How do you keep your kids motivated and on task in the mornings? I mean, besides by nagging them to death…I’ve got that one down!  Leave me a comment and share with us all.

Tags: early elementary, preschool

Nature & Science with Kids

Messy Recipes for Hands-on Play

Dancing Popcorn
Fill a small glass about 3/4 full of water.
Add 2 tablespoons of baking soda and mix well.
Add a drop or two of food coloring.
Add 10-15 popcorn kernels.
Then add a few drops of vinegar.
The kernels will start to move in 1 -2 minutes.

Volcanic Eruption
Place an empty baby food jar on a tray. Surround the jar with salt dough to look like a volcano/mountain.
If you want to make this activity, a multi-day experience, the the salt dough dry or bake it in an oven until hard.
Then allow children, to paint or color the mountain, glue bits of twigs or leaves or grass on to make it look like vegetation, and otherwise decorate their volcano.
When you’re ready for an eruption, place a drop of red food coloring and a tablespoon of baking soda in the jar.
Then add vinegar to your volcano to make it erupt.

Catch a Cloud
Have you ever wanted to bottle a cloud? Here’s how!
Pour just a bit of water into a two-liter plastic bottle.
The adult should light a match and drop it into the bottle.
Immediately close the lid.
Squeeze the bottle a few times to watch your cloud form.

Make Butter
Use room temperature whipping cream. Pour some into a baby food jar or other container and let your child shake it for a while. The butter aill forming to a small ball. Pour off the liquid. Let your child taste it to see what’s different about it and milk. Spead the butter on a cracker or piece of bread. You may want a bit of salt.

White Mud
Unravel about 1 1/2 rolls of two-ply toilet paper and put it in a plastic tub.
Add some dish soap.
Slowly warm water, 1 cup at a time, while you and your child mix it all together by hand until you like the consistency.

Ice Cream
Fill a gallon-size ziplock bag half way with ice.
Add 6 tablespoons of rock salt.
Put 1/2 cup of milk or half and half, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring into a small ziplock bag and seal. The ice and rock salt can puncture this bag so it is a good idea to double bag the ice cream mixture into another small ziplock bag.
Put the small bag inside the large bag and seal.
Shake the large bag until you have ice cream (5 – 8 minutes).
Note: The ice cream is going to be more a “soft serve” texture than like commercial ice cream.

Gooey Goop
1 cup cornstarch
a small amount of water

Add water slowly to cornstarch until the goop drips from the spoon.
The mixture will seem hard, but when you pick it up is slides between your fingers.
If it is too thin and liquid, add a little more cornstarch.
Add a bit of food coloring for fun. It might be a fun way to see how colors mix together.
You can use a funnel to put about 1/2 cup of this mixture into a water ballon. Then you’ve just created your very own stress ball for relaxation. Careful with young kids though since the balloon can be a choking hazard.

The internet is full of wonderful, hands-on experiments and activities that help children explore science and nature concepts. Share your favorite activity with us. Leave a comment below.

Tags: early elementary, preschool, sensory activities

Rote Counting

Rote counting is learned largely through repetition and drill-type practice. So the key to this is keeping kids interested! Frankly, this type of practice is boring for all of us. Have empathy for your child and you’ll greatly improve your success.

First, make sure you’re practicing in short sessions. I rarely set aside a block of time to work on counting. Instead, I find little pieces of time throughout the day and suggest we practice counting while we’re waiting for something else. It’s a form of distraction, and it usually has a fairly clear endpoint. Short, frequent, and consistent practice is the best way. A few happy practice times throughout the day is better than one longer miserable practice session. So do it while you’re waiting for things: the toast to pop up, the dentist to be ready for you, your friend to come over, the crosswalk signal to change, etc.

Second, break up the task into parts. Start with solidifying numbers 1-10. Then work on numbers 1-20. The teen numbers are tricky. Most preschoolers and some kindergartners are still getting a handle on them and often skip one or more or say them out of order. Some children always skip a particular number. One way to address this is to slow way down as you approach the number that your child skips and emphasize it. If your child isn’t predictable in this way, simply count slowly until she starts to build speed and confidence in the sequence. When your child skips a number, do encourage them to try again and slow down. Incorrect practice is not useful.

Next, demonstrate and practice numbers up to 39. This usually goes faster than learning the teens. At this point your child will probably start to recognize the pattern of counting and be able to figure out how to count the 40’s and 50’s etc. The task at that point is to learn the names of the groups of ten. Be generous with providing the next number after 39, 49, 59, etc. You don’t want them thinking thirty-ten and thirty-eleven are numbers. It’s best not to practice mistakes!

Finally, look for ways to add in sensory elements to improve memory. Number songs or rhymes can help young children learn numbers 1-10. Rhymes like “One, two, buckle my shoe” can be helpful. But, even chanting rhythmically will help. If your child is willing to sit down for a more formal activity, pointing to the numbers on a number chart will add in the visual sense and help them with number recognition. Any kind of dancing, marching, or jumping adds a kinesthetic element which will help your child focus and remember better too.

Tags: drill, early elementary, math, preschool