Sunday Showcase: Teach Mama

My hard drive was blown on my computer but now we are up and running!

On another note, I wanted to get back to my Sunday Showcase. This week Teach Mama had a very important post that I wanted to share!

Teach Mama is a great website that I subscribe to through my Google Reader. She always has great posts and inspiring ideas! She is a Reading Specialist and former High School English teacher. Her love of reading and teaching drive the site. The site is packed full, you should certainly take time to investigate it thoroughly!
The post I wanted to share, in particular, has very important information for parents. As a teacher, I always spent time sharing this same information with my students' parents. The post entitled,

learning during read-alouds: 5 things never to say to emerging readers

is something that should be shared with parents and caregivers the world through! I taught a Literacy Night every year teaching these same 5 things never to say to readers. No parent says them to hurt their child, but rather to help. They just do not know that what they are saying and doing is not helping at all.

One way I explained this to parents, was to tell them that their job was to facilitate reading and not teach reading. Their job was to help their children love books and reading. We all know that we do not learn a new skill under duress, the same can be said for reading. We need to make it fun, exciting, a source of entertainment as well as informative. Check out this posts as well as her other informative posts!

Comments

Name Writing Practice

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter. As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...

Play to Write- Week 3

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name. We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts. He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...

Build My Name

I had some more Styrofoam from boxes and wanted to re-purpose them. I decided in building blocks with Jacob's letter of his name. We have lettered blocks but this is just one more way to see his name and one more way to practice his name. I sliced the styrofoam to make the blocks sized from smallest to largest. This will hopefully help him learn the letter orders. I showed him the blocks and we talked about what word we saw spelled out with the blocks. We then read each letter and sang our song: J-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap A-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap C-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap O-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap B-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap We then knocked down the blocks and I let him play with them to see what he might do. He just played with them for a bit. I then suggested he build a tower. He went ahead and started building a tower. I told him to take caution and look at the letters to make sure the letters are in the correct di...

Structured Play

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