Why do Elephants help spelling?

BECAUSE

Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants

 

 

So there you go - a simple mnemonic from the 6 year old...

 

Mnemonics are sentences or phrases in which the initial letters of the words spell out a word which many people find rather tricky to spell. He was really proud of remembering this - do you know of any others that he can learn?

Today's Target: Spelling High Frequency Words

We have now managed to read the high frequency words and we have moved on to learning to spell them... here are ten ways we tried with varying levels of popularity / success.

1. Traditional spelling test - me reading the word, him writing it down on paper
2. Using magnetic letters
3. Copying the words, saying each letter as he wrote it
4. Typing spelling test - as above but typing the answer on the computer
5. Writing silly sentences of target words
6. The look, cover, write, check method (more about this method on another post but we found also found some games online - have a search)
7. Backwards spelling - I said the letters and he had to work out what the word was
8. Using the letters from Pass the Word
9. Oral quizzes - "how do you spell..." This was great when driving or waiting for appointments
10. Correcting my spelling (for words I knew he knew - not good for learning!)

Fairy Tales for Boys?

Over the holidays we went to Warwick Castle and went into the Princess Tower. They have warning signs that it is "not for boys" but boy #2 wanted to go in the Princess Tower so we did.

The story goes that Princess Tower is home to Warwick Castle’s very own fairytale princess, Princess Arabella and that preparations are underway for her wedding. Children go into one of the castle rooms and meet a princess who tells them all about Princess Arabella's forthcoming wedding to Prince Toby and along the way she shows the children various things from other fair tales. So they meet a frog (who she kisses to see if it will turn into a prince), Sleeping Beauty's spinning wheel, the bed from the Princess and the Pea, one of Cinderella's old ragged dresses and help to chose the fairy tale outfit to go with Princess Arabella's dress. Then they go into another room and dress as princesses (with boys dressing as knights as a bit of an afterthought) before going onto the room of wishes where they write their wish in the book.

All in all it would seem a great introduction for children to fairy tales - so why then is it all "pink" and why are they discouraging boys from getting involved?

Surely, all children need to know traditional tales not just girls? and is it any wonder that boys are not achieving the same results in literacy if they are not being given encouragement at even this most basic level.?

Other Spelling Help

From comments posted onto the Facebook link to yesterday's post about texting helping spelling it appears people are still sceptical!

If you would like a more traditional way of helping your child learn take a look at these Orchard Toys Spelling Puzzles now in stock at Littlesheep Learning. These lovely jigsaws have between three and five pieces and contain a lovely illustration with the word written underneath with each piece having one letter and a part of the picture. Children will enjoy completing the puzzle whilst learning to spell the word.

Older children might like the spelling game Pass the Word where they need to race against the timer to put together a word, trying to be quick as when the time runs out the letters have to be passed on to the next player.

Thinking Thursday - Emergent Literacy

I've been following a lot of new blogs recently and I thought I'd share some posts that I've enjoyed and think that others might find useful.

This post is about a selection of posts at Because Babies Grow Up on Emergent Literacy. These posts give lots of information and ideas about how to encourage and motivate little ones in their literacy development.

Emergent Literacy #1: Print Motivation
Emergent Literacy #2: Print Awareness
Emergent Literacy #3: Letter Knowledge
Emergent Literacy #4: Vocabulary
Emergent Literacy #5: Phonological Awareness
Emergent Literacy #6: Narrative Skills

Do take a look, let us know what you think and don't forget that you can find more literacy activity ideas on this blog get lots of resources to support literacy development are available at Littlesheep Learning.

Reading for Life

You may remember reading on our blog last year about the 2008 National Year of Reading, at the end of March, the National Year of Reading team published Reading: The Future, a report that reviews both the achievements of the Year and all that we learnt about promoting reading. Significantly, the report details the impact of the Year on the attitudes and behaviours of key target audiences.

The most important message in the NYR report is that it worked. Behaviours and attitudes to reading among target audiences were benchmarked at the beginning of the campaign; the survey was repeated at the end of the campaign to see if there had been any shifts. The headline data shows:

• Nearly 13 million individuals in target social groups C2DE were reached through the campaign, 57% of the total C2DE adult population (only 75% of this segment of the population can be reached through the media)
• A significant increase in library membership among C2DE parents and their children; 70% of these children are now members, compared with 58% before the campaign
• An increase in library membership nationally; 2.3million new library members recruited between April and December 2008
• A significant increase in the proportion of C2DE parents reading to their children every day (from 15% to 20%).
• Among C2DE fathers who read to their children, over a quarter say they now read every day compared with 19% at the baseline survey
• A significant increase in children saying they read with their mothers every day (32% up from 17%)

This is all fantastic news, and this is a moment when everyone who worked to make the National Year of Reading a success should be proud. Every librarian, teacher, tutor, local authority adviser, publisher, bookseller and early years practitioner who promoted the National Year of Reading is a stakeholder in its success and should be relating to their managers their contribution to these achievements.

To build on the success of the National Year of Reading, the National Literacy Trust has launched Reading for Life, a new campaign to continue the work of the Year by improving the life opportunities of people in most need through reading.

Grow your own

We've been busy in the garden so far this Easter Holidays with the children planting seeds (mixed flowers, pumpkins for the biggest pumpkin competition and sunflowers for the tallest sunflower competition!).

If you are avid gardeners as part of BBC’s Dig In series, you can get some free seeds. The aim of the series is to introduce the joys and benefits of growing your own. It’s easy to get some free seeds - you’ll be sent tomatoes, squash, beetroot, lettuce and carrots by filling in a simple form on their site. Smaller gardeners (under the age of 16) can get their own seeds from the CBeebies website!

Letting children help to grow their own food is an fabulous learning experience for them, which teaches so much. Planting seeds involves literacy skills - reading growing instructions and writing identification labels, numeracy skills - counting the seeds and sharing them between pots, and the digging, sowing, watering involved is great for gross and fine motor skill development.

Are you going to grow your own this year? Do comment and us know what are you growing and your top tips!

Signed Stories

I've just come across Signed Stories a new ITV website, which shares educational stories through sign language, sounds and animated pictures.

Signed Stories has a very simple goal – to help improve the literacy of deaf children nationwide by allowing them to share in the joy of storytelling. It’s also designed to provide useful advice and guidance for the parents, carers and teachers of deaf children; and for the deaf parents of hearing children.

Signed Stories has been designed primarily as a website for deaf children – although hearing children will enjoy it too. It’s a fun, busy space which encourages children to explore and offers easy access to a wide range of the best of British books.

But it's also designed to be a resource for adults to use alongside children. The videos can be paused while you point to signs, illustrations and words, and the introduction will tell you why we've chosen those stories - which ones are good for introducing new signs or adding props and toys and which ones are simply fun to share.

I've just had a quick look and there are plenty of favourite titles including "Not Now Bernard", "Owl Babies", "Chimp and Zee" and "Six Dinner Sid". More books and nursery rhymes are promised throughout 2009 - so it's worth bookmarking and revisiting it over the coming months.

New Products: Magnetic High Frequency Words

We are pleased to announce the arrival of these Mega Magnetic Words to enhance our range of reading resources. We are stocking the key word sets for both Reception children and those in Years 1 and 2.

This set of large Reception Magnetic Words contains the first 45 High Frequency words which every child is expected to recognise by the end of their Reception school year as part of the National Literacy Strategy.

Building onto the Reception Magnetic Words pack, the Years 1 and 2 sets list the remainder of the High Frequency words which every child is expected to recognise by the end of Key Stage 1 / Year 2.

New Products: Fantastic Fairy Tale Puppets

We have now added four new sets of story puppets - Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Billy Goats Gruff to our range of puppets.

These fantastic puppet sets are come with a detailed story card to help you tell the story of the fairy tale and contains the main characters you would expect to find in the enchanting favourite story.



These puppet sets are great for children learning traditional tales, beginning role play activities and are ideal for giving as a gift coming in it's very own see-through PVC handy bag / carry case. They are also a great for inclusion in story sacks.

We also now have all of the other story sets: Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood back in stock.

Spelling

It doesn't take many words to demonstrate how tricky the English language is when it comes to spelling; try: accommodate, commitment, bureaucracy, diarrhoea , psychologist for starters. Then there are all the words with similar sounds spelled in different ways for example, the 'eez' sound (breeze, cheese, knees, fleas, tease, these, seize) and the words spelled the same way but sounding different, for example the 'ough' letter combination (bough, cough, dough, enough, though, through).

Spelling is not just a case of identifying sounds in a word and being able to relate them to letters, though this is a big help in many cases.

Being a good speller also involves:

• breaking words into component parts and writing each one correctly
• remembering some spelling rules
• being able to see the word in your head and 'read it off'
• learning some 'word families'
• having good visual recall and being able to tell if it 'looks right'

There are many ways to help children learn to spell:

• encouraging them to 'have a go' if the word they want to use is regular: 'Well let's see, there are five letters in that word let's put five dashes on this bit of scrap paper. I'm sure you know what the first letter is..'
• supporting them to build up the word as appropriate; the middle bit is often the tricky part − fill in this part for them if necessary
• praise for trying 'that's nearly right, well done'
• providing the word straight away if its irregular and can't be 'built up' eg 'two'
• give a visual model of the word rather than just spelling it out verbally , then encourage him to do LSCWC (Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check) to help them remember the word next time
• encourage children to look at the words carefully − 'take a photo' in your head; notice its shape and any double consonants, or any small words inside the bigger word
• say it aloud − using a mnemonic for tricky words can help
• identify word families; for example, fight, light, might, night, sight, tight
• make use of word banks, use a (spelling) dictionary / word book or other dictionary and look it up
• play word games for example, hangman, wordsearches, crosswords or games such as Pass the Word

Encouraging Reading

As this year is the National Year for Reading and next week includes World Book Day, I thought I would write a post about how parents can encourage their children to read. Most parents (and grandparents) want their children to do well at school and want to support their learning so here are some ideas to help. The trick is to find ways of fitting this into busy schedules and to keep it fun. Even very young children can benefit from 'sharing books' − discussing pictures, looking at words, talking about the story and characters.

When trying to start reading activities with your children it is important:

• keep it short
• choose the time carefully − not while your child's favourite TV programme is on or when they are tired etc
• do it regularly − 10 minutes every day or three times a week is better than trying to fit in a 'long session' at the weekend
• make it enjoyable
• understand the task and the learning purpose
• use rewards.

Some ideas for reading activities:

• use the local library for free access to a variety of different books to stop you getting bored of the same ones (unfortunately young children do like repitition so be prepared to need to read the same book every day for weeks!).
• play reading games including; I spy, bingo, letter and word lotto, word jigsaw games for example, Nonsenses and Pass the Word
• put a word of the week on the fridge, you could use word flashcards or magnetic words / letters
• find time to listen to your child read and read to them.
• ensure that incidental reading is part of everyday activities; reading recipes, DIY instructions and travel brochures can all provide opportunities for reading in the home over and above books and comics
• read the same book as your older independent reading child and then then talk with them about the characters, the plot and their favourite parts.

Incidental Learning

Oh dear, I haven't written a blog post for ages - we had the Easter holidays and the weather has been so good we've been out and about enjoying the sunshine. New things at Littlesheep Learning are few and far between too as we've been so busy having fun!

As we've been out and about our children have been learning so I thought I would post some of the incidental learning that we've had going on.

• looking at street name signs when out for walks - an excellent resource for learning capital letters
• painting with water on the wall - great for upper body gross motor development / practicing writing / science of wet and dry
• playing with objects in water - which ones sink and which ones float
• playing making shadows - great for fun fine motor imitation practice
• making and melting ice cubes - the science of water properties
• growing beans
• cooking - measuring good for maths, stirring / rolling / shaping good for fine motor development
• labelling colours of cars when out for walks - easy method of checking colours
• looking for minibeasts - we found ladybirds, spiders, beetles, snails, slugs, ants and worms

Let me know your incidental learning activities and I'll add them to the list!

Spring, Trees and Poetry

Today is the first day of Spring, World Poetry Day and World Forestry Day.

Spring has sprung! We've already mentioned some of the Spring festivals from different cultures and I'll be adding more about Spring showers tomorrow for World Meteological Day and then next week when we look towards Easter and other April festivals.

World Forestry Day is celebrated around the world on 21st March. This day commemorates the contribution and value of forests and forestry to the community.

Celebrate World Forestry Day by visiting your local woodland - look for the signs of Spring - the new leaves / blossom on the trees, the flowering of daffodils, snowdrops and bluebells, and the birds building nests. Look at the trees, can you identify the different types of trees and plants, do bark and leaf rubbings, and have fun running aroung exploring!

Believed to have its origin in the 1930s, World Poetry Day is now celebrated in hundreds of countries around the world. This day provides a perfect opportunity to examine poets and write poetry. In 1999, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) also designated 21st March as World Poetry Day. Check out the Read Write Think website for lots of information on different types of poetry with special tools to help you write your very own create acrostic poems, diamante poems, letter poems, or shape poems.

We'd love hear your poems especially those about Spring, trees or the weather please add them as comments on the post.

National Story Telling Week 2007

Yesterday I held a coffee morning for other mums / dads and small children along with a photographer and a reporter for the local paper, the reason for this is that this week (30th January to 4th February) it's National Storytelling Week and they wanted to know our opinions on sharing stories with our children.

National Storytelling week is an annual event which aims to raise awareness of this ancient form of entertainment - check out The Society for Storytelling for more information. Storytelling is the ancient tradition stretching back for as long as humans have had speech, known as the 'oral' tradition where stories are shared in groups. The storyteller is an artist, an entertainer and an educator who uses words to take you on a journey of the imagination. Each person will hear something different as the story is created in the space between the teller and the listener.

Storytellers tell traditional folk tales, written tales, anecdotes, urban myths, stories from history, religious or moral tales and stories they have created themselves or which have been created for a specific event. Some storytellers will create a story spontaneously to suit the audience. They tell stories from memory rather than reading them from the book, memorising stories image by image not word for word and may tell a story differently each time they tell it, interacting with their audience, choosing stories and images to communicate with them and some use music, dance, song, pictures or puppets.

Storytelling supports literacy development, storytellers can improve concentration, listening skills and help develop and enrich spoken and written language. Hearing and retelling traditional tales can provide scaffolding for children’s own imaginative stories, giving the child a variety of frameworks to work from.

Sight Reading - High Frequency Words

Introduction
High frequency words are the essential words which pupils will need, to be able to read even very simple texts. Some of these words have irregular or difficult spellings and are often difficult to predict from the surrounding text. The list is in two sections with 45 words to be achieved by the end of the reception year (YR) and approximately 150 words to be learned between Years 1 and 2. By the end of Y2, pupils should be able to read all these words easily, in and out of context.

Reception Words

I	are	big	it	he
go	the	she	at	am
come	of	and	play	all
went	we	they	no	is
up	this	my	yes	cat
you	dog	see	for	get
day	me	on	a	said
was	like	away	dad	to
look	going	mum	an	in

Reception Year Words are available as laminated flashcards from Littlesheep Learning

Year 1 and 2 Words

about	can't	her	many	over
then	who	after	could	here
people	there	will	again	did
him	more	push	these	with
an	do	his	much	pull
three	would	another	don't	home
must	put	time	your	as
dig	house	name	ran	too
back	door	how	new	saw
took	ball	down	if	next
school	tree	be	first	jump
night	seen	two	because	from
just	not	should	us	bed
girl	last	now	sister	very
been	good	laugh	off	so
want	boy	got	little	old
some	water	brother	had	live(d)
once	take	way	but	half
love	one	than	were	by
has	made	or	that	what
call(ed)	have	make	our	their
when	came	help	man	out
them	where	may

Plus: days of the week, months of the year, numbers to twenty, common colour words, pupil's name and address, and the name and address of their school.