STOP and learn to read!

There are some first things that a child learns to "read". One of those things is often a stop sign:

A lot of people will argue, he's not really "reading" the stop sign. He's not actually decoding the print. He could not "read" the word in a different font, in a different location, if it was not on a red, octagon shaped sign. That is probably true, but that does not mean he is not reading it.

Reading is seeing print and getting meaning from it. Although a young child reading a stop sign is not "real" reading, it is certainly the beginning of real reading, and it is something that you can use to teach reading.

You can teach a lot of reading with just the stop sign. Using only a stop sign you can teach the following skills:

• letter versus word (early reading skills)
• capital versus lower case letters (alphabet)
• letter identification (alphabet)
• letter/sound connection (phonics)
• letter formation (writing)
• first letter and last letter (early reading skills)
• counting (math)
• reading left to right (early reading skills)

Click here to download the STOP and Learn to Read printable pack FREE! (For best results print on card stock and laminate.)

Here's how you teach your child to read using a stop sign:

First, start pointing out stop signs when you see them and say things like:

• Look, there is a stop sign!
• Do you see the stop sign?
• That sign says STOP.
• Do you know what that sign says?

Next, wait for your child to start pointing out the stop sign. Now you are ready to start to focus your child's attention on the details of the stop sign. When he says, "I see a stop sign!, you say something like:

• You're right, that sign says STOP.
• What color is the stop sign?
• Do you see the letters on the stop sign?
• The stop sing is an octagon shape, it has 8 sides.

Now you are ready to dig in deeper. This involves more than just a drive by. You can take a walk and stop and look at a stop sign up close. You can use copies of stop signs at home to take a closer look.

To teach letter versus word point to the word STOP and say:

• This is the word STOP.
• There are four letters in the word STOP: S, T, O, P (point out each letter)

To teach first letter, next letter, and last letter point to the letters and say:

• S is the first letter in the word STOP.
• P is the last letter in the word STOP.

Print and cut this puzzle to practice saying the letters, building the word, counting the letters and working left to right.

Reading left to right can be shown to them by sliding your finger under the word STOP as you say the word slowly. Read the names of the letters, pointing to them as you say them S-T-O-P. After lots of modeling ask your child to read the word using their finger and to point and say the letters. If they have trouble matching one-to-one then hold their finger and guide them. As you are pointing to each letter and saying the name you are working on letter identification.

Get out letter tiles or magnetic letters and have them build the word stop. Make sure they always start with the letter S and build the word from left to right to reinforce the left to right movement in reading and writing.

This page can be used to trace the letters to practice letter formation, and then build the word with letter tiles or magnetic letters:

You can practice writing the word stop to practice letter formation. Follow the directions for letter formation explained in The Name Game.

Counting:

• Count the letters in the word STOP. (You are also reinforcing letter versus word.)
• Count the sides of the sign.

Capital and lower case letters:

Print out the capital and lower case letter cards to use for letter identification, matching capital to lower case, and building the word stop. 

Show them that the word on the stop sign is written in all capital letters. Show them what it looks like with lower case letters.

We got out the letter tiles (Bananagrams) and matched them up to the letter cards.

We made the word STOP with different letters.

More letters to make the word STOP.

How many different kinds of letters can you use to make the word STOP?

Finally, the last page included in the STOP and learn to read printables is the size sequencing with numbers. 

I had a plan to arrange the signs and the numbers on the pocket chart like this:

As often happens, my daughter had another idea about how to use the numbers 1-3. She quickly got another set of number cards from the pocket chart and matched them up:

Letter tiles, STOP and learn to read printables, Traffic sign printables. We made a mess, we had fun, we learned!

Continue with the fun with these great related FREE printables:

Memorizing the Moments: Traffic Signs Printables

Click here to go to the free printables and blog post Traffic Sign Tot Pack from Memorizing the Moments

Enchanted Homeschooling: Truck Storybook Fun!

Click here to go to the Truck Storybook Fun blog post and free printables. at Enchanted Homeschooling Mom.

123 Homeschool 4 Me: Traffic Signs Preschool Pack

Click here to go to the free printables and blog post Traffic Signs Free Preschool Pack at 123 Homeschool 4 Me.

Makinglearningfun.com Street Sign Memory Fun

MakingLearningFun.com has Street Sign Memory Fun

What do I need to buy?

I created my Growing Readers lessons and activities so that they could be done with nothing more than some paper, index cards and a pen. The next step that involves spending a little moneybwould be a printer, paper, and some cardstock to make use of lots of free printables. Now I'm going to suggest some additional purchases to consider. These are items that you will be able to use for several years, such as: a magnetic white board, letter manipulatives, and a pocket chart.

Good ol' magnetic letters. Cheap and easy to find!

One of the first investments I suggest is a subscription to starfall.com. At only $35 per year it is a bargain as the activities can take your child from a preschooler learning the alphabet through a fluent First grade reader. The activities on starfall match up with and supplement the Growing Readers program nicely.

I like the way Handwriting Without Tears teaches letter formation. I'm not a big fan of workbooks unless you happen to have a child who just loves them. If you are going to purchase any workbooks, I would recommend these for pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade. Even if you don't purchase any of their products, watch the videos on how to teach letter formation. You can purchase more of their resources or use your own chalk boards, chalk, etc.

A chalkboard and chalk is essential. It provides different tactile feedback than a pencil on paper or a marker on a whiteboard.

A table top pocket chart is a great basic purchase that you can use with lots of things for years to come. You can get them in a wide range of sizes that can hang on the wall, or you can get a table top version like this one:

Smethport Table Top Pocket Chart with Building Words cards

For about $20 you can buy a table top pocket chart. This one comes with a set of cards of your choice (sight words, letters, etc.) The one shown has the "Building Words" card set. These can be used in the beginning for basic alphabet learning, later to build and read CVC words and other words. You can make your own cards to go with a pocket chart like this.  You can find and download free pocket chart printables. You can also purchase sets like the ones shown below.

Word families for the pocket chart

Sight Words for the Pocket Chart

Beginning sounds for the Pocket Chart

Discount School Supplies Sight Word Pocket Chart

This one from Really good stuff has both a pocket chart and magnetic dry erase. A bit more expensive at $40, but you get both the pocket chart and magnetic dry erase all in one. Perfect for small spaces!

Desktop Pocket Chart with magnetic dry erase from really good stuff

To go with your magnetic white board you'll want some magnetic letter manipulatives. Remember, the goal is to buy things you will use for a few years. A set of letters can be used for basic letter identification at the preschool level, all the way to building spelling words in 3rd grade. You can choose tiles or plastic or foam letters, like these:

EZread Soft Touch™ Economy Multicolored Foam Magnetic Letter Kit

Magnetic Alphabet with Red Vowels

This kit from Lakeshore has letters and activities for alphabet learning, basic phonic, lots of hands on activities:

 Reading in a Flash! Letter Fun Learning Tub $29.99

This is another kit with letters and activity cards.

Lauri Toys Phonics Center Kit-Alphabet

Keep for eye out for good deals and thrift store finds. Think of these things when grandparents ask what to buy your child for a gift.

With just a few resources you can learn and play with letters and words for several years!

Growing Readers: Shared Literature

The single most important thing you can do to successfully grow a reader is to read to them. After that, read to them some more! My goal was always to read to my toddlers at least a dozen books a day. Along with all of the reading skills you are teaching, make sure you are taking lots of time every day to read.

An important component of the Balanced Literacy approach is Shared Reading. You do not need to be thinking about shared reading every time you read to your child, most of your reading should be free flowing, just you and your child/children sitting down to enjoy a good book. Here we will talk about teaching reading skills through shared reading, and choosing some books (one book a month, for example) to extend with some literature based activities.

You are already familiar with reading aloud to your child, so here's a little more information on what shared reading is (you may find you already do a lot of this with your child):

• During shared reading the parent models and explicitly teaches the process, strategies, concepts, and mechanics of reading.
• The child joins the parent in reading and re-reading a specific text.
• Shared reading allows children to absorb what they need to know about reading without having to read independently

Some favorite classic children's literature

When you take out a book for shared reading think of some things that you want to model and teach. Look at the list of what good readers do (remember, it is not just about decoding words) and think about how you can model these things when reading aloud:

Good readers:

• Have a purpose for reading
• Think about what they already know
• Make sure they understand what they read
• Look at the picture when possible
• Predict what will happen next
• Form pictures in their minds
• Draw conclusions about what they read
• Try to figure out new words

How do you model and teach these skills?

Before reading: 

• Talk about the title and the picture on the cover.
• Take a "picture walk".  Look through the pictures and talk about what is happening in the pictures.
• What do you think this book is about?
• Have you ever (picked blueberries, lost a mitten, wanted a toy)?
• Who do you think will be in this book? What characters will be in the book (introduce that vocabulary)?

While you are reading:

• What do you think will happen next?
• (After reading on) Were you right? (Remember, it is not important if your prediction is wrong or right, just that you made the prediction. Great books are full of surprises that you didn't expect!)
• Show them features of print, punctuation (I know he was excited when he said that because there is an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, see it here, the line with the dot at the bottom).
• Ask them to predict beginning letters (What letter would you expect to see at the beginning of the word "bear"? Let's find the word bear with a B at the beginning.)
• Ask your child to find letters or words that they know.
• Pause and let your child "read" a familiar passage. The quickly memorize favorite parts and repetitive text.

After you read:

• Why do you think he did that?
• What do you think will happen next?

More Information and resources
7 Ways to Build a Better Reader for Ages 3-5

Take a look at easy ideas to bring books into your young child's life.

Pre-K Reading Increases Your Child's Confidence

Welcome to the amazing world of Pre-K reading. Learn tips and brighten your child's future successes.

Improve Reading

Reading can be improved by making connections with material, building fluency, and understanding meaning.

After you have read a book you might choose to do some literature based activities to go along with the book. Continue re-reading and enjoying the book during the days and weeks you complete the activities. Here are some links to free literature based printables:

Literature Based Printables

Homeschoolshare Literature Based Unit Studies

Finally, what to read  The Kindergarten Canon   a great list of must read picture books Classic Picture Books

Connect with your child by sharing the timeless books that you loved when you were growing up.

Best Books for Wordplay: Ages 3-5

See what letters, words, or phrases your child can remember on her own. Try substituting a wrong word and your child might correct you!

Best Cuddle-Time Books: Ages 3-5
Discuss the illustrations in these gorgeous picture books. Ask your little reader about what he thinks will happen next.

Growing Readers: Early Alphabet Learning and the Name Game

Is your preschool aged child ready to start learning the letters of the alphabet? If so, where do you begin? What is the right order to teach the letters? Do you begin with the letter A and go in ABC order?   Should we do a letter of the week program?  My answer is to begin with what you know!

There is some research, shared on Reading Rockets, where they concluded that there is no perfect order for letter instruction: "It may be reasonable to begin with a "personally relevant" letter (first letter of the name)." Start with what you know,  your child's first name.

Learning to identify letters of the alphabet is a beginning step in teaching phonics and reading. However, before your child is ready to learn phonics she first needs to learn some phonemic awareness. Beginning with your child's first name, and the letters in it, you can introduce your child to not only letter identification but also phonemic awareness, phonics, letter formation (writing), and early reading skills while playing "The Name Game".

There are several levels of phonemic awareness:

1. Rhythm and rhyme
2. Parts of a word
3. Sequence of sounds
4. Separation of sounds
5. Manipulation of sounds

The Name Game teaches:

• letter versus word (early reading skills)
• capital verses lower case letters (alphabet)
• letter identification (alphabet)
• letter/sound connection (phonics)
• letter formation (writing)
• first letter and last letter (early reading skills)
• counting (math)
• reading left to right (early reading skills)
• syllables (phonemic awareness)

The name game is not accomplished in one sitting. It is a collection  of activities that you do with your child over days, weeks, even months. You will do the activities multiple times. Do one or two activities at a time, based on your child's interest and what they are ready to learn. Below is a list of ideas, you may come up with more! Once your child knows all of the letters in her own name you can do the name game activities with other names that are important to your child like brothers and sisters, cousins and friends. Kids like to know how to read and write each other's names.

Write or print your child's name clearly on a piece of card stock. If you are typing and printing it think about how you want the letters (particularly the letters a and g) to look. Comic Sans MS and Chalkboard are good fonts that look like "printing" and do not have a type set a and g. Here's my example:

Letter Identification:

Tell your child, "This is your name. Your name starts with the letter J". Point to the letter J. Jackson begins with the letter "J".  "J is for Jackson."

Point to each letter as you say them J-A-C-K-S-O-N, then sweep your finger under the whole word and say, "Jackson".

Do this in other places you see his name as well.

Look for the first letter of his name in other places. Soon he may begin to notice the letter J. "Look!" he may point out on a sign, "I see J is for Jackson!"

Look for and point out his first letter in books.

Continue for the rest of the letters in his name.

Capital versus lower case letters:

Point out that the first letter of his name is a capital or big letter, and the rest of the letters are lower case or little letters.

Syllables and phonemic awareness:

Practice clapping your child's name, with one clap for each syllable. "Let's clap your name: Jack/son. Your name has two claps."

Letter versus word; Reading left to right; Counting:

Write or type the name again on card stock but leave double spaces between letters. Show them the name. Tell them that their name is a word and it is made up of letters. Tell them,"I'm going to cut up the word into letters. Lets's say the letters as I cut them."

Cut apart the name while saying the letters one by one.

"Now it is not a word anymore, it is not a name any more, it is just a bunch of letters."

"Let's count the letters from your name" Together count the letters.

"We can put the letters back together in the right order to make your name."

Work together to put the letters in order to make the name, using the first name card as a model. 

"What letter comes FIRST in your name?"

"What letter comes NEXT in your name?"

Continue until you get to, "What is the LAST letter in your name?"

You are modeling that the oder of the letters matters in a word. That a word it put together from left to right.

When it is all finished, "Now it is a word again! Let's check it. Is it right?"Say the name slowly while running your finger underneath to check it. Have him check it the same way.

Now you are modeling reading left to right.

Keep this "name puzzle" that you have made in a baggie and he can practice putting his name together. Watch him and make sure he is always starting with the FIRST letter in his name and building from left to right. Correct him if he starts from the end or the middle, or starts building from right to left.

As he becomes more independent in putting it together continue to talk while he does this, talking about the FIRST letter, NEXT letter, LAST letter, pointing out letter names and capitals etc.  Talk about direction, how you have to start here and the next letter has to go here etc.  Now it is a word again.  Check it? Is it right?  Say it slowly while running finger underneath to check it.  Have Jackson check it the same way.

Letter/sound connection:

As you continue to work with his name and as he is getting to know the names of the letters talk about the different letters and the sounds that go with them.

"What sounds do you hear first in Jackson?"

Model the /j/ sound and have him make the /j/ sound.

"What letter makes the /j/ sound?"

"Jackson begins with the letter J."

Find other words that begin with the same letter. You can collect some pictures and glue them on a paper for a J collection.

Find the letter here on Starfall.com.

You can continue and do a letter of the week using each letter in his name. Some good letter downloads at:

http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/letter-of-the-week

http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/TotSchoolPrintables.html

http://homeschoolcreations.com/preschoolalphabet.html

Don't miss the great ideas here! The A-Z of Learning Letters

Letter formation:

Model writing your child's name. See if they can tell you which letter to write FIRST, NEXT, and LAST.

Model correct letter formation. Correct letter formation is really important. It is much easier to teach correct letter formation in the beginning than to un-learn incorrect letter formation and re-teach correct formation.

I like the way they teach letter in the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. Download the letter formation charts from HWT and learn the correct letter formation for yourself (you may be forming some letters "wrong"). http://www.hwtears.com/hwt/parents/parent-extras

One thing to know is that HWT only introduces capital letters in their Pre-K material, so you will need to get K material to cover both capital and lower case letters. While my goal is to avoid workbooks as much as possible and provide more hands on learning, if you are going to use a workbook for hand writing and/or letter formation the HWT materials is what I would recommend.

If you have access to a chalkboard this is an excellent method. (Even if you don't, watch the video to see some good modeling of letter writing.) Watch the video on the HWT website that shows how to teach your child to write their name using the "wet-dry-try" method: Video Lessons: Writing Name Using Wet-Dry-Try

More:

Help your child build their name using magnetic letters, or other letter manipulatives.

Form the letters of their name out of play dough.

Practice writing in a variety of mediums:

• sidewalk chalk

• chalk on black construction paper

• paint letters with water

• markers

• crayons

• dry erase

You can continue with similar activities with the names of friends and family, even pets! It is a great way to introduce sound/letter correspondence, letter formation and letter identification in a way that is meaningful to your child. It is much form meaningful to know that M is for Mommy than M is for Monkey.

Bears, Bears, Bears!

Little Miss turned three in June, so this Fall I decided to try to do a bit or "formal" school work with her every day. She's been asking for school work, so I guess it is time.

I decided to start with a theme: Bears (I first want to admit that I have a bit of a problem with collecting books and school related materials. I have an insane amount of manipulatives, flannel board pieces and other assorted necessities. In my own defense, a lot of this was collected during my days of classroom teaching.) So I pulled out everything "bear" that I could find and we proceeded to "play school".

Nomenclature cards 

I started with good old Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? I downloaded a really cute Brown Bear, Brown Bear early learning pack from 1+1+1=1 I laminated the things that I knew we would work with multiple times.  On the right are some of the Nomenclature cards from the pack that go with the story. You can find more Nomenclature printables on the Montessori Printables page on 1+1+1=1.

Little Miss playing with the Brown Bear, Brown Bear Nomenclature cards.

Here she is enjoying some of the activities from the early learning pack.

Putting together some puzzle cards.

What would a bears unit be without a bunch of bear counters! There are so many things you can do with these little guys: counting, patterns, sorting, colors, matching. I think the bears were a good investment because I know we can use them for several years. Right now we can practice counting, colors, and sorting. Later we can do addition and subtraction, more complex patterns, even multiplication and division.

Colored Bear Counters and sorting bowls

I start by giving her lots of time to just play and explore with the materials. She had several chances to play with the bears and the bowls before I started to suggests activities with them. Sometimes I would suggest things, other times I would play along side her and model something I wanted her to try, like putting the bears into the bowls according to their color.

Patterns with bears.

One day I pulled out these pattern strips and started matching bears to the pattern, and saying my pattern out loud, "red-yellow-red-yellow..." She did not seem to be paying much attention to me and was placing her own bears on cards without matching the colors. Suddenly she looked down at her card and noticed that a green bear was on a yellow square. "That one doesn't go here!" she said. She took the green bear off and replaced it with a yellow one.

We also have a color bear bingo set hat you can use the bears with. It comes with these little paw markers. Little Miss really liked to match a bear to each colored paw.

Bear to paw color matching.

When we finished playing the bears were usually all over the room. Little Miss really likes to throw things. She is learning not to, but we are still working on it. While she is often a good helper at clean up time, when she is feeling reluctant going on a "bear rescue" will often get her into action.

 A bears unit is not complete without reading a few different versions of The Three Bears.

The Three Bears flannel board.

After reading the story we got out the Three Bears flannel board story. We had fun retelling the story (along with using all of the different voices for the different bears). She liked to match up the bears with their correct chairs. Sometimes she did not want me to tell the story and just wanted to play with the characters.

Another bear activity I got out was the dress up bear puzzle. She loves to make all of the different bears. Her favorite part is the faces, each with a different expression. She likes to talk about the sad bear, the happy bear, and the angry bear.

Finally, there was the workbook. Just kidding! No workbooks as I think in general they are far less educational than learning through exploration and play. Another problem is that there is usually only one right way to do a workbook page. I'd like to put that off as long as possible. At three years old we are building a foundation for future learning, and so far we are having fun doing it!