Hands-on measurement activities are fun to explore with children. Introduce your young learner to these interesting new vocabulary words and knowledge, and help your child develop an early love of measuring everything in sight!
Welcome in the New Year with new friends! You’ll meet the woman whose mathematical interests helped lead to the modern computer, share the excitement of a storm on Ferris’ original “observation” wheel, discover who started the first community center for the poor, and more fascinating life stories. Each of these books is not only well sourced (and documented), but also made to be shared by reading aloud. So open a book and curl up with a friend in hand on a cold January day.
“Learning to read can, at times, seem almost magical,” Blevins begins this brief on phonics instruction. “But it’s not magical.” In this brief, the author provides a clear description of what phonics is and why it matters. Although phonics can be taught in different ways, research supports instruction that is explicit and systematic. In addition to being explicit and systematic, strong phonics instruction has the following seven key characteristics: readiness skills, scope and sequence, blending, dictation, word awareness, high-frequency words, and reading connected text.
By reading and writing about the lives of real scientists, students can learn more about the nature and history of science and how important scientific discoveries were made. Students may also begin to see themselves as scientists by trying on scientists’ lives for size.
Creating a word family chart with the whole class or a small group builds phonemic awareness, a key to success in reading. Students will see how words look alike at the end if they sound alike at the end — a valuable discovery about our alphabetic writing system. They’ll also see that one little chunk (in this case “-an”) can unlock lots of words!
Meg Medina is an award-winning Cuban American author who writes picture books, middle grade stories, and YA fiction. Her picture books include Tía Isa Wants a Car and Mango, Abuela, and Me, winner of the 2016 Pura Belpré Honor Award. Her middle grade book, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, won the 2019 Newbery Medal.
