Your tinkering early reader!

Julie Haden —  : Nov 18, 2013 — Leave a comment

model magic budgeemodel magic

It is easy to forget how much creativity your child possesses, but watch her get busy when you give her some Model Magic, an empty cardboard box or paper towel rolls. What else is interesting is how that tinkering leads to more inventions, questioning investigation and reading.

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Your tinkering child might begin a sewing project with recycled clothes and then ask, “How many ways are there to stitch?” The question leads him to read about his stitching choices in his sewing kit instructions, or to find a book at the library about sewing. He might be lucky enough to have snap circuit kit.snap circuit To make something, he has to choose a project and then read specific directions for example to get the fan to begin to move once he places the motor correctly into the circuit. All of this is likely to lead him to experiment. Once he becomes comfortable with diodes and transistors – information in the instructions or in the library – he might begin to ask, “What would happen if I plugged in the circuit here?”

Well-crafted magazines for kids (Highlights and Ask are favorites in our house) can inHighlightsspire your child to bouts of creativity. With craft materials readily at hand, he can quickly act on his inspiration, which will motivate him to read more. You will begin to see the excitement when his favorite magazine comes in the mail.

Tinkering leads your child to reading more about the “process” and reading often inspires tinkering and the desire to learn more about a topic. Where does all of this questioning and tinkering lead? It leads to your child becoming confident in their ability to create with what they have at hand and to learn whatever their heart desires. What could be better than that?

What are some of the ways your child likes to tinker?

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Click on this photograph to read an excellent Wall Street Journal article about children who tinker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The power of your expectations! Motivating your early reader.

Julie Haden —  : Nov 11, 2013 — Leave a comment

Knowing what motivates your child is important to cultivating an early reader. As a teacher, I am aware of what motivates my students and have a clear outcome in mind. Especially when my preschoolers are learning to read, I am aware of what engages them and what does not, because the end goal is clear – reading enjoyment!

What motivates your child? Is it a toy, a sweet treat or a visit to their favorite fast-food restaurant? As parents, we often forget just how our words, action, and gestures influence our children. It is especially easy to forget this when tired or rushed. However ultimately, your clear and high expectations will motivate your early reader. When you have a clear goal for your child to succeed, you are inherently building your child’s self-esteem. In the end, your belief motivates your child’s good decision-making and choices.

Dr. Angela Duckworth

Dr. Angela Duckworth gives a TED Talk about grit. Click her photo to link to her talk.

Your high expectations help foster your child’s academic achievement and motivation. Research supports this view. Dr. Angela Duckworth studied motivation, and its measurement. She studied kids and adults – including teachers working with students in tough neighborhoods. She found that students with passion and perseverance where most likely to finish the school year. In short, they found that these kids had grit. Grittier kids were more likely to graduate, regardless of IQ or family background. How do we build grit? Building your child’s self-esteem and setting clear expectations builds grit.

“Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in, and effort toward a very long-term goal. It often correlates with self-control.” – Dr. Angela Duckworth

You know this. I know this. However, so much of society is antithetical to making our children gritty. Opportunities and rewards seem to come without effort in the world around us. Many games and TV shows make it seem that success comes easily and deal with mistakes negatively – not as learning opportunities.

roadmap2reading games motivate and provide positive feedback through data that is clear to you and your child. For example, when your child learns a letter sound, the letter begins to glow and fireworks go off. Your child’s play receives intermittent rewards for her hard work and persistence. She keeps her rewards in her treasure box. Intermittent rewards in our games are like a rewards card from your favorite store. You get a reward just because you frequent their establishment and purchase their products. This is very motivating because you get a payoff for just showing up. We want your child to learn, have fun, and be motivated to play. The payoff is huge – your young child learns to read, which leads to her self-esteem and success!

What activities capture and motivate your child’s sustained attention?

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Your early reader at home

Julie Haden —  : Nov 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

Your home is your child’s learning environment. So what might the environment of your early reader look like?

Books will become a huge part of your child’s learning environment. As your child becomes an early reader, she will delight in a bedroom that holds many books in shelves, and a comfortable bed, table and chair for reading. A reading light over your child’s bed that is dim enough to sooth, but not too bright, will help support their likely wish to read before nodding off. As your child becomes a more proficient reader, she will likely to return to favorite books. She may be almost 8 years old and still look back at board books in between venturing into Harry Potter or an encyclopedia of North American frogs. Books become friends to your early reader who may want to keep many of her books – so consider more bookshelves. Of course, toys and clothing are in your early reader’s room too but hidden in bins to free her of distracting clutter.

Bella room

Distractions can influence your child becoming an early reader who is motivated to learn as much as possible. Screen time can become a major distraction. If you have TV, consider keeping it behind cabinet doors and on only in the evening after bedtime. Consider limiting your child’s time on the iPad, too. Interestingly enough, you may find your child will want to craft or pursue other creative outlets instead of iPad time. The key point is that your early reader’s environment is set up so that reading is what he wants to do, because other distractions like TV and the computer are a controlled privilege.

Clutter can be another distraction. Consider keeping your child’s toys in her room in containers. Fewer toys can foster creativity. Contrary to what some might think, more “stuff” does not necessarily lead to a happier, smarter child. Instead, more seems to lead to a child who is only satisfied with the latest toy.

Cultivating imagination and creativity can help cultivate your child’s interest in early reading. Creative play that encourages imagination can help motivate him to become an early reader. To foster your child’s imagination and creativity, focus on providing materials and places inside your home dedicated to your child learning. Elsewhere in your home where you and your child frequent, consider providing an easeBella sewingl and stocking a craft cabinet. Supply obvious things like glue, crayons, and paper to the less obvious like recycled clothes, tape, cardboard tubes and boxes. You will find your child may choose to create if they are not far from the action in your home with less screen time and clutter. Once your early reader is comfortable in their learning environment that you create, and wants to learn to do something, like sewing or building a model rocket, he will read about it first and then give it a go. Free of screen time distractions and clutter, he will find entertainment in what is available in the current environment rather than wanting new toys or more time on the computer.

If possible, a backyard or other outdoor space can benefit your early reader. It doesn’t have to be big – but it should be secure and private. Ideally, it is fenced in and private enough your child can easily explore and play without your constant attention. A sandbox is a favorite areMud Pies.indda where your imaginative one can make cakes for backyard fairies  or pursue a career as a famous scientist. A garden is another favorite for learning the names of various herbs and plants, which become material for creations or samples for the microscope. A birdfeeder too is an endless source of inspiration for research, drawing and storytelling. Again, only a few toys hidden in containers – mostly tools for creating, exploring and moving the body.

Regardless of where you live, your early reader is most likely to thrive in an uncluttered environment where easily accessible books are the main entertainment and screen time is limited and tied to privilege – where toys fulfill needs rather than to satisfy wants and are a special treat.

What is your early reader’s home environment? How do you cultivate early reading?

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Brain research and screen time. How can reading compete?

Julie Haden —  : Oct 30, 2013 — Leave a comment

I was cleaning out my office the other day when I came across a booklet on brain research applied to early childhood learning. The work by Rod Ingraham, M.D., a specialist in pediatric medicine and behavioral medicine at the Mill Creek Center in Georgia, provides surprisingly practical recommendations.

  1. No TV before age two. American Academy of Pediatrics makes this recommendation because TV negatively impacts your child’s development, attention, intelligence, well being, and their success in school. Instead read to your infant every day and spend more time face-to-face.
  2. Read regularly to your child from early infancy. By age two, those who are read to have reproducible cognitive developmental differences from those who were not. They develop better language and thinking skills and are more likely to enjoy reading in school.
  3. Children who are read to regularly develop better attention systems and show improved school readiness skills. Reading aloud is a precursor of reading success and better vocabulary development in later school years.
  4. Keep TV out of your child’s room. Children with a TV in their room are less likely to read well, as are those who live in a house where the TV is always on. The average child has three hours of screen time each day (TV, computer gaming) – obviously this leads to less reading time.
  5. Make certain your child’s TV and gaming content is non-violent and age appropriate. Violent, age-inappropriate content can encourage a distorted sense of reality and tends to cultivate a sense that the “real” world is mainly about being entertained. Children with that view of reality are less motivated by any activity that is not considered fun or entertaining. Your child will develop best by experiencing the “real” world around them.
  6. Increased TV and gaming time negatively impacts the development of normal left brain attention systems which are crucial to focused mental effort and persistent thinking. More TV and gaming time equals more cases of ADD in our children today than ever before.

Limiting “screen time” and making sure that games have educational value and are grounded in a positive “real” world helps prepare your child for success.

Our series of apps, roadmap2reading will allow you to limit your child’s time playing our games – starting with a suggested 30 minute limit. While playing our games, your child gets to escape to “real places” like the beach while he learns how to read. Our games provide positive praise for measured progress, and bring to your notice his hard work and attention. Playing games on a computer is not bad, within limits, if their purpose is skillfully promoting learning and fun.

What learning games do your children enjoy that positively ground them in reality?

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Click on the photograph to link to the Wall Street Journal’s recent summary of “screen time” recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

 

 

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Many parents express concerns over the academic rigors of the Common Core State Standards. They feel that their children are expected to perform at a level that is too challenging, too soon for their age. Many of these children could perform at a higher level if they had received enrichment as preschoolers. We expect kids just to rise to the challenge. In reality, many come to school unprepared with the foundations.

Kids well prepared with preschool enrichment are ready and eager to be pushed! I see this in my daughter who has been reading since age two. She has participated since kindergarten in the Common Core State Standards implementation at her elementary school. The challenge has motivated her in a good way as she has demonstrated through her excellent standardized scores. As much as I wish for her more creative time and less structure while in school, I do see her learning a lot, and very confident and happy about going to school.

The beauty of the Common Core State Standards is that it creates both accountability for what is taught and a general standardization between schools across 45 adopting states. As a former public school teacher, standardization creates more structured planning and provides more data that shows how kids are really performing. As a parent, that data is evidence that my child is learning; and can be compared from year to year to assure that learning continues.

Preparing our teachers to effectively adopt the Common Core State Standards is essential to our children’s success. Ideally their instruction should give our children enough mastery to be able to teach others what they have learned. Makes sense! However, teachers accustom to teaching children for years to memorize and test and then move on before mastery will need time and training to change their teaching – a challenge, but not impossible, if our school systems are prepared.

The rewards will be worth it. The Common Core State Standards will push our children hard – hard enough to compete effeccommon core state standardstively in the world today.  Kids who come to school well prepared with preschool enrichment will be more than ready for rigors of the Standards. However, waiting to start teaching until kindergarten is too late!

Is the Common Core State Standards too much for our children? What do you think and why?

 

 Posted by Julie Haden  on: Oct 22, 2013 In Blog
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Early readers make the world a better place!

Julie Haden —  : Oct 14, 2013 — Leave a comment

Over the years, I have volunteered regularly in public schools. A number of years ago, I remember one favorite teacher and her third graders. Many of her students were either non-readers or were reading way below grade level. I worked with two of her lowest students weekly. Both were motivated and very aware of how far behind they were in reading. One student had been suspended for fighting already. Both of these kids would not have been in this situation if they had had early reading enrichment experiences as preschoolers.

Sadly the research supports that children who are not reading on level by third grade generally do not even graduate high school. There is just too much “catch up” time. They cannot keep up with the academic rigors as they progress. What happens to these kids? Many go to prison, become pregnant as teenagers, or at best are unemployed.

When I look for data to support early enrichment I turn to the work of Dr. James Heckman – winner of the Noble Prize in economics in 2000 and professor of economics at University of Chicago. He is known for his paper, “Schools, Skills and Synapses”, which concluded that public investments in children 5 years and younger yield the greatest return.

Heckman

So how do children that are early readers make the world a better place? They are better prepared for the Common Core State Standards adopted by 45 States. Review of the Standards shows clearly that early readers are prepared better to handle these academic rigors because:

  1. they are able to take in more information quickly
  2. they have more vocabulary
  3. they love to read and are strong readers

These skills prepare them well to take tests which are how their knowledge is measured in today’s schools. Data supports what I have come to believe through my experiences as an educator and parent: children who are successful in school go on to be successful in life! We can make the world a better place by putting more emphasis in early reading!

What are the skills you see that help kids to be successful in school?

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The early reader’s advantage!

Julie Haden —  : Oct 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

Many people ask me, “Why is it important for a child to be reading at an early age?” I answer:

  1. Choice motivates early readers and reading opens the world of choices. Yes, reading to your child is a great way to start. the blue marble - Earth seen from Apollo 17Even before they can read independently, they can tell you what they want you to read to them. When they start to read independently, they can choose the words to ask about. As they become more proficient, they begin to decide what they want to learn. Their advantage is that they can learn about subjects you may have never thought to teach – motivating them to want to learn more by reading more.
  2. Early readers develop interests and expertise in subject areas because they can read advanced texts independently – unlike children who start reading in kindergarten. My daughter is a nonfiction buff – particularly in the area of animals. Because she started reading at two, she was able to read adult texts when she was four. She excels in the areas of science and social studies due to this backlog of information that she learned when she was much younger. In a nutshell, that expertise “effect” makes early readers very motivated to read and take in as much information as possible.
  3. Reading early is a great way for a child to build their vocabulary. Once in elementary school, early readers have a wider range of vocabulary and ideas which makes learning more complicated texts – like nonfiction – much easier for them because of their advanced vocabulary skills.
  4. Early readers are confident and successful. You may have noticed that school has gotten more academic in nature. No longer do we have half days or nap time in kindergarten. Our children are expected to be ready to go once they enter kindergarten. If they are not ready to read, they get left behind quickly. Children who come to kindergarten with a strong reading foundation or who are already reading independently can keep up with the quick pace of the curriculum. They tend to be confident and secure about their abilities in school. This leads to greater enjoyment and overall motivation within the classroom environment.

When I track the kids I have taught and my daughter’s progress, I see success continue throughout their school experiences. Children who are successful in school go on to take that success through their lives and help to make the world a better place.

I would love to hear your views of the advantages of being an early reader! How has early reading helped your child or a child you know?

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It’s official!

We’re an Apple developer. Now to get busy!

 Posted by Joel Haden  on: Oct 8, 2013 In Sketchbook
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Five ways to cultivate early readers

Julie Haden —  : Oct 3, 2013 — Leave a comment
  1.  Touch each word as you read to your child to emphasize that each is separate and unique. Emphasize that you are reading from left to right to teach directionality.
  2. Put objects that all begin with the same letter sound in a bag or box. Have your child pull them out. Say each object’s name emphasizing its beginning sound.  For example, cat begins with the |c| sound just like cow.  Then let them pull out more objects that make the same sound.
  3. Frequent the library. Help your child pick out books that they are interested in and age appropriate.  This shows them how much you value reading.  Let them see you reading your favorite books too.
  4. Play rhyming games.  This can be great fun on road trips or walking outings together.  For example, you might say, “I saw a cat on a mat with a _____. ” Let them fill in the blank.  There are no wrong answers in this game, except the sillier the better including nonsense words!
  5. When you teach letter names, use letters that are lowercase because this is what they will see in books.  Save capital letters until after they’ve mastered the lowercase.  You can find a set of lowercase letters at a teacher’s supply store.

Use these 5 ideas to start having fun cultivating an early reader!

What are some ideas you’ve used with your child to promote early reading?

Bella and Julie


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Welcome to my roadmap2reading blog. This blog provides information, ideas, opinions, and support that you can use with your child immediately to cultivate early reading.

Through my blog, I want to build a community where we share ideas, thoughts and concerns – and work together to make the world a better place through early readers. As a parent, teacher, and researcher, I have wondered often what makes children become successful in school and in life. If you have too, I hope to both assist and learn from our community.

Together let’s create a world where children as young as two begin the journey to early reading! – Julie Haden

bella reading in the library

 

 Posted by Julie Haden  on: Sep 30, 2013 In Blog
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