Monthly Archives: November 2014

Talking with my Children-taken from Angela Notari-Syverson, 2006

Posted on by
Reply

parent childWhat Should We Talk About? 

Talking About Things Outside

Talking to children about what they see or hear teaches them new words.
Ask your child questions about things he/she sees outside:
• What color is it?
• What do you see?
• How does it feel?
• What shape is this?
• What does that remind you of?
• How would it look if it was snowing?

To help your child succeed, you can:
• Talk about something your child can touch and feel.
• Ask your child questions about things he/she is really interested in (rocks,mud, butterflies).
• Ask your child simple questions (Is this rock smooth?)
• Help your child to describe things with more than one word (brown, smooth, hard).

To make this activity more challenging, you can:
• Describe something nearby and see if your child can find it. Have your child describe something for you and try to find it.
• Play with your child at putting things into categories (beetles are insects, an acorn is a nut, a rose is a flower).
• Talk about how things would look different in other weather conditions, or times of the day.
• Ask your child to imagine how things would look different if your child were the size of an ant.

 

 

The Writing Beehive – We Need Your Help

Posted on by
Reply

bee

 

 

Mission Statement: The Writing Beehive Center’s mission is to help inspire enthusiasm for writing by creating pleasing presentations of students’ best writing efforts for the school community to read.

How Does it Work? The Publishing Center exists to process your student’s best writing with parent volunteers to type student’s stories, make book covers and volunteer in school to make everything run smoothly.

Parent Volunteers can help in three different ways:

1)    Type at home – students stories are sent home with your child.  Paper and directions are provided.  You type the stories, print them out and send them back to school.  Sometimes the printing is on half size paper, sometimes full size and sometimes the typed files are emailed back to the teacher.

2)   Make covers for student’s books.  Covers are made by taking oak tag and binding the story with the oak tag.

3)   Volunteering at school in the Publishing Center by restocking supplies, sending out student’s stories for typing, sending out covers for assembly and binding books together after they are returned.  A training session will be scheduled to show everyone who volunteers for this exactly what needs to be done.

 

 

 

Using the Newspaper for Reading Practice

Posted on by
Reply

Dear Families,

Either old fashioned newspapers delivered to your home or online newspapers are great to use with your child. Newspapers offer topics that are current and relevant in addition to offering your child hundreds of activities and ideas that stimulate reading development.  Here are some ideas:

  • Ask you child to cut out four to five headlines from the newspaper.  Give them to your child and ask them to create new stories for each headline. This is a great way to encourage informational writing.
  • Ask you child to make up positive headlines that include the names of family members

For younger children:

  • Ask them to cut out letters from newspapers headlines to create their own words. They can also make new sentences with words that were cut out.
  • Have your child cut out items from furniture ads and then have them group them based on which room they belong in.

Use Newspaper In Education online:  http://nieonline.com/nieonline/lessons.cfm?category=elementary

 

 

 

newspaper