Because we already know how to read and most of us don’t really remember much about how we got here, we often don’t realize that preschool age children tend to hear words as a single sound. Not consciously realizing that words can be comprised of beginning, middle and end sounds.Being able to distinguish different sounds within a word is the basis of the phonics approach to teaching reading.Being able to distinguish different sounds within a word is the basis of the phonics approach to teaching reading. Children who have no experience with rhyming and letter-sound correspondence before kindergarten are slower to learn to read in first grade.
Rhyming teaches children to hear ending sounds in words, which can easily be done by exposure to common nursery rhymes, e.g. ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’. Many children’s books, such as ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See’ and ‘Goodnight Moon’ incorporate this skill as well. Once they catch on to distinguishing the ending sounds, it doesn’t go away.
The following activity teaches children to recognize similarities in ending sounds. There are 16 sets of 3 pictures of objects. For each set, say aloud the three objects and then ask your child to point to the picture of each when you say it aloud a second time.
The first set is a ‘bear’, a ‘pear’ and a ‘sock’. Ask them to point to (or circle if you have printed the pages) the two pictures that sound alike.
You can also ask if they know another word that sounds similar (e.g, they might say ‘tear’, but might also say ‘clock’ if they are aware of the one that doesn’t rhyme with the other two). Asking them to point to or circle the two pictures that rhyme reinforces what they have learned because they will be rehearsing it as they do it.
I’m not a teacher, So how can I effectively help my child learn preliteracy and pre-math skills at home?
The material on this site is already familiar to you, so there’s no new learning for you! The hardest thing for the ‘parent as teacher’ is usually finding the time in a busy world to sit down and work together. Setting aside 15-20 minutes to work together a couple of times a week usually works fine.
Parents can utilize fun activities and materials to make teaching fun and easy at home.
Parents are a child’s best teacher because of the innate bond they share and the parent’s deep concern for their future. Parental praise and one on one time are the strong motivators for young children. If you show an interest in their learning this material, they want to please you.
If your child doesn’t like a particular activity or is bored, try another. Let your child’s interest guide the process as much as possible. Working together should be a rewarding experience…. Not ‘work’. It also helps to have stickers on hand that can be ‘worn’ or placed in a special book at the end of each session. Also revisit old activities occasionally to reinforce skills they have learned previously.
Other than time (and perhaps stickers!), patience is probably the other most important element. It’s helpful to remember that children really aren’t ‘miniature adults’, no matter how verbal or smart they can be. And they will work hard for your praise if the task is within their capacity to accomplish.
Number recognition and counting are two foundational elements for acquiring basic math skills. As adults we tend to see them as the same thing. But for young children they differ in important ways because recognizing a symbol like the number 3 is not the same as understanding the concept of what the symbol stands for.
Counting and number recognition are foundational skills for math competence.
Doing is learning for most young children and an easy way to teach number recognition is with dot-to-dot tracing. Examples that you can print out for the numbers 1 to 20 are in this pdf file. (I attached the file in this e-mail). We can also teach child to say the numbers from one to ten much in the same way we can teach them the ABC song that requires them to sing the letters of the alphabet in sequence. This is really just memorization (which is a good skill in itself). But learning the sound of the letter ‘c’ in a word is a step further and provides a link to learn that the word ‘cat’ starts with ‘c’. In the same way, a child might learn to say the numbers in sequence from 1 to 10, but it doesn’t guarantee they have moved to the next step of being able to count up to 10 items.
Teaching children to count is the pre-math skill that gets the least attention in preschool curriculums. Learning to count before entering kindergarten is one of the most essential skills that predict a child’s ability to learn and enjoy mathematics later in school. This is why Federal guidelines suggest that children transitioning to kindergarten from pre-school should be able to count to 20. So learning it at home can improve kindergarten readiness. After children recognize the numbers, an effective way of teaching counting at home is to pair the number with counting. This helps them to understand the concept of what each number stands for…. that the number 2 actually means two objects, not just the number that comes after 1 and before 3.
Children have a natural sense of quantity, such as ‘more’ or ‘less’, ‘greater or ‘smaller’, and even awareness of the first few numbers (one, two, and three) though they may not know the names. This sense of quantity is an extension of our ability to perceive differences in the relative size of two groups, such as bunches of grapes.
Learning to count however is more complicated because it involves three distinct skills: 1) learning to see objects within a group as individual items, 2) re-organizing these items into a relational hierarchy (1,2,3….), and 3) having a symbolic system to represent numbers.
These skills can be combined in a task integrates them for 3-4 year olds, but it requires you to help. Below is an example of this integrative approach to teach counting. It uses five circles that vary in size and color and you ask your child to touch the circles following the questions listed. If they get it wrong, or find it confusing, you can do it first and them have them copy you. The picture that the child sees is on the right. The circles the child should touch following each question are shown on the left. The questions to be asked are on the bottom for you to read. As you can see, the task relies on color recognition and size recognition for sorting, as well as the ability to ignore size and color when asked how many total items are in the picture.
The example uses only 5 items in order to accommodate the limited short-term memory of children at this age. And asking them to touch the circles instead of pointing meets satisfies the best practice that says, ‘children learn best by doing’ (so do adults!).
At the next level, there other ways of teaching children to count easily up to a 100 and beyond that involve grouping items into fixed quantities like 5 or 10. We will show oyu some of those techniques in another lesson.
Looking for ways to help your child become a strong confident reader? Teaching sight words is a great step on that path. Recognizing words by sight, without having to sound them out, allows children to be faster more fluent readers.
Children with large sightword vocabularies become strong confident readers
Sight words are words that are commonly used and recognized without sounding them out. Being able to recognize these words quickly and accurately allows children to read with more speed and accuracy. This helps build their confidence as they can recognize words quickly, and move on to more complex words and phrases. It also helps them comprehend what they are reading, as they can focus on the meaning of sentences rather than sounding out each word. Having a strong foundation of sight words is essential for children to become strong, confident readers.
Here are 10 simple and easy things to do to teach children sightwords:
Teaching sightwords while you read is an easy way to help your child become a confident reader.
1. Read stories and books that focus on sight words. Point to the words and pictures and have your child say the word with you. As your child becomes more familiar with the words make it a race to see who can say the word first. Find other places where the words are written and point them out–signs, posters billboards, etc. familiar have your child say the word with you
2. Use flashcards to practice sight words.
3. Create fun worksheets using sight words.
4. Play games with sight words, such as Bingo or Matching. 5
. Have children color sightword images and trace the word.
6. Use magnetic letters to help children learn sight words.
7. Sing songs that use sight words.
8. Incorporate sight words into everyday activities.
9. Have children trace sight words with their finger.
10. Break longer words into smaller chunks to help children learn them.
Learning sightwords helps children to quickly recognize common words in text. Knowing these words helps children to read more fluently, as they are more likely to recognize the words when they see them. When children are able to recognize sightwords quickly and accurately, it allows them to focus more on the context of the text, which helps them to understand what they are reading. This in turn leads to improved reading comprehension and strong confident readers.
Phonetic awareness is one of the most important building blocks of literacy learning, and rhyming is a fun and easy way to introduce and practice rhyming skills. Research has shown that rhyming is a good predictor of later reading achievement (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008) as well as a host of other cognitive boosting benefits.
Rhyming is a good predictor of later reading competence
Rhyming focuses attention onto specific sounds within words—isolating the phonemes and syllables—and then comparing those to other words. Nursery rhymes and rhyming games are a fun and natural way to help children develop the skills to isolate and compare specific sounds within words. In addition, rhyming has been shown to help children learn repetition and rhythm, boost verbal skills, increase vocabulary, and even improve recall and memory.
Three Stages of Rhyming
There are three basic stages of rhyming–exposure, recognition, and production. It can take a while for rhyming to click, so the more that you can expose and call attention to rhyming words the easier it will be for children to progress into the next stages of rhyme learning. As their rhyming ability progresses, creating opportunities to flex this new found skill will boost phonetic abilities and prepare them to become proficient readers.
Books are an Easy Place to Start
Use Rhyming books to increase phonics learning and literacy.
There is a plethora of rhyming books to choose from! Pick a few that you feel will be age and interest reflective of your child and incorporate them into your daily reading routine.
As you read, point out the words that rhyme, “Cat and Hat rhyme, they sound the same at the end, let’s say them together, cAT, hAT.” Have your child point to the pictures of the rhyming words. This article has more suggestions on how to optimize reading with your child. This is all part of stage one, as the books and rhymes becomes more familiar, you can help your child work on stage 2 by letting them fill in and say the rhyming words on their own. Let it be a fun interactive part of reading.
Nursery Rhymes Provide Additional Benefits
Nursery Rhymes boost phonics and other language skills
Nursery Rhymes are great options for rhyming books, they tend to use a cadence and words that are less common in our modern language, which is great for expanding vocabularies and literacy exposure. Nursery rhymes also can contain humor, emotions, and examples of social behavior that can be a great scaffold for children to gain these skills for themselves. As your child progresses through stages one and two, continue to point out and emphasize rhyming words.
Use Music for Rhyming Exposure and Practice
Singing can be a great way to develop Rhyming awareness
Anywhere you can sing, you can work on rhyming skills. Singing is just rhyming set to music, and you can boost the phonetic value of singing by pointing out or emphasizing the rhyming words in a song. As rhyming awareness grows let them fill in and sing the rhyming words. Combining multiple senses in learning is always beneficial, so if there are hand actions or silly voices for the rhyming words all the better.
Rhyming Practice can be Done Anywhere
Another game that helps a child advance through recognition (stage 2) into production (stage 3) is having them identify words that don’t rhyme within a set of rhyming words. Say three words, two of which rhyme, then ask them which one doesn’t work. As they get better at this game you can increase the number of words and use longer, multiple syllable words.
As your child enters the third stage of rhyming production, you can create rhyming riffs on games like Name as Many as You Can and I Spy. Have one person name an item and let the other come up with as many rhyming words as they can, then switch. You can have speed rounds, timed rounds, anything to spark their interest. “I spy with my little eye, three things that rhyme with ___.” All the better if a child can outsmart the grown ups and find more items than you.
Be creative and make up your own games that present fun challenges and can be done just about anywhere—car rides, waiting rooms, public transportation, prepping dinner, etc.
Rhyming games are a fun way to increase phonics skills
Rhyming Board Games
For the kids that love playing board games, there are a number of options. Some of our favorites are Rhyming Bingo and Rhyming dominos. There are also fun Rhyming puzzles.
Getting your child ready for kindergarten in today’s world is so much more than just teaching them the alphabet and how to use a glue stick. Activities that are fun, interactive, and engaging, are an easy way to incorporate kindergarten readiness into the daily routine and ensure that they are truly ready for kindergarten.
Parents are the mot important teachers
Why Parents as Teachers?
This site is oriented towards helping parents develop preliteracy and pre-math skills in 3 to 6 year old children to give them a leg up when they start elementary school. We see this as a form of home schooling that can stand alone or amplify what children are learning in preschool and kindergarten.
My Irish grandfather used to say that ‘every parent wants a small unfair advantage for their own child’. He didn’t mean this as a criticism, but rather as a reflection on the role of the parental/child bond that insures the survival of the species. Education was (and still is) is one of the advantages to which he referred.
Parents are important in this learning process for scientific and practical reasons. Since my grandfather’s day, we have learned a great deal about the role that genetics and early experience play in early learning. Both nature and nurture help to organize the development of brain circuits that form essential parts of higher cognition. These are circuits that will important roles in higher academic skills such as literacy, math, music, or art, as well as social and emotional skills related to empathy, cooperation, patience, introspection, attention, and planning. So early development of brain circuits involved in these skills is associated with increased academic success.
Most parents today are familiar with this general concept and look for practical ways to help their child reach their fullest potential. Acquiring preliteracy and pre-math skills prior to entering elementary skill is an important step in this process.
But what about teachers?
For parents with children in preschool, it’s commonly assumed that preliteracy and pre-math skills are best taught by teachers. But preschool teachers have 10-20 children of different backgrounds, capabilities, and emotional needs. Teachers also have a lot of material to cover with a whole child curriculum. So teaching abstract material involved in preliteracy and pre-math is more time intensive that other types of activities focused on socioemotional or physical development, and teachers have limited time to work with children individually.
Children also don’t naturally gravitate toward learning abstract information such as letters and numbers. It’s not concrete like swings, dogs, or lunch. Their interest usually comes from their parent’s interest and the child parent bond stimulates their curiosity and desire for approval. Moreover, the learning process in this area is not just a matter of rote learning for children, but rather through associating letters and numbers (or sigh words and sounds) with something they already know.
This is why a child’s best teacher of preliteracy and pre-math skills is usually a parent. For example, a child will often learn to recognize the word ‘dog’ when parents read a story about a dogs and point to the word when they come to it on the page. So parents and children reading together can be a great way for children to learn site words and other aspects of language as well.
Age appropriate cognitive, emotional and practical skills taught in preschool
1. Put together simple puzzles
2. Identify parts of the body (head, shoulders, knees, ankles, arms, legs, etc)
3. Draw self with head, body, arms, legs, hands, feet, facial features
4. Be able to state age and birthday
5. Recognize and label basic emotions in self and others (Happy, Sad, Angry, Surprise, Scared)
6. Tell full name when asked
7. Identify pictures that are alike and different
8. Be able to tell or retell a simple story
Preliteracy and pre-math skills taught in preschool
1. Know the letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case.
Language and literacy skills taught in kindergarten
1. Rhyming (e.g. nursey rhymes)
2. Letter sound correspondence (basic phonics)
3. Counting 30 items or more
4. Recognition of common shapes (squares, triangles, etc)
5. Do simple addition
6. Recognize common sight words. *
* Sight Words vary widely across kindergarten classrooms. There is no accepted universal list. However, they generally consist of 50 to 100 common words that can be used to teach reading to children in school. Examples include run, jump, red, green, an, the, in, see, bed, up, down, go, walk, for, one, two, three, not, boy, girl, cat, dog. For additional sightword practice, use our Sight Word App
Young children love repetition! Prepare to read their favorite books over, and over, and over again. Though you may find this boring, The child’s brain is finding something new and learning with each repetition. Think of all the things a child’s brain is tasked with learning at this age, each repetition helps them through organization, categorizing, pattern matching, attaching words with objects, etc., etc., ect… Even though you may feel it’s a bit of a snooze fest, let your child choose the book and drive the number and frequency of repetitions as soon as they are able.
Reading to children regularly is a great way to increase their literacy learning
Case Study with Good Night Moon
Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is the most popular bedtime children’s bedtime story of all time. The story is deceptively simple and parents may not realize that it is designed to link abstract words with the child’s everyday experience. Children often love hearing the story at bedtime, night after night. They don’t know they are learning that words have different beginning and end sounds (rhyming; mittens and kittens) or consciously consider that words are symbolic representations of things they already know: objects (moon, cow, etc), object characteristics (green, red), object spatial relations (over, on), or object actions actions (jumping, whispering). They just know that it’s familiar and find the repetition soothing.
The illustrations in the book follow the text on each page so parents can help children make the association between the word ‘cow’ or ‘moon’ with the picture of the cow or moon, or the cow jumping over moon, the red balloon and the bears sitting on the chair. Repetition within the story and reading it frequently before bedtime work together to unconsciously teach the brain to link words to experience. No formal teaching lecture/degree required!
Reading together can help to enhance children’s literacy learning.
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of—
The cow jumping over the moon
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs
And two little kittens
And a pair of mittens
And a little toy house
And a young mouse
And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush”
Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Goodnight cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush
Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush
And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush”
Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Good night noises everywhere
Finally, its worth a reminder that this practical example of how parents can help children acquire preliteracy skills such as rhyming and sight words relies on the importance the parent places on the practice and the enjoyment it has for the child. This is why parents make such good teachers of these types of skills.
