books

This week, Liska from Adventure in a Box shares a super-cool, totally new-to-teachmama.com idea.  So cool, it’s nuts. Liska is a toymaker, a creator, a mom, an artist and a lover of books.  She is a Russian who has settled in Canada with her …

I’ve said this before: June and July are crazy for us with our busy swim and dive schedules. So honestly, any downtime my kids can get, I’m totally thankful for. Even when Maddy, Owen, and Cora are not at practice, they …

This post about getting reluctant readers to love reading is written by Ali Dent of Courage on the Edge of Tomorrow. Thank you, Ali, for this incredible post! ____________________ Getting Kids to Love Reading with a Literacy Club–LITClub, by Ali Dent Reading doesn’t …

    For any occasion, books are my go-to gift. From baby showers to birthdays, graduations from preschool or highschool, for well-wishing or comfort-giving, books are a rockstar way to show people you care. This holiday, my pal Allie and …

    The following guest post is written by Jackie Higgins, of Ready-Set-Read. Jackie is a great friend and longtime we teach member, now a member of the we teach advisory board. ———————————- I’m Jackie, an early literacy blogger, reading …

It’s hard to watch a child struggle trying to read a book that is too difficult, especially when the kiddo is adamant about plowing through it.  Whether the struggles be with decoding the words on the page, with reading fluently, …

Summer is almost in full swing, and for our family, there’s no better way to begin our summer fun than with a Summer Reading Kick-Off Party! Each year, we invite a few friends over and turn it into an easy …

Some children are able to easily read the words on a page but cannot remember a lick of what they read. Believe it. Whole paragraphs, pages, chapters can sometimes decoded–words read, even fluently–but nothing.  The child remember nothing.  Frustrating right?  …

The school year is slowly winding down, and finally (finally!) we’re settling into our summertime schedule–not the spring-summer overlap that has had me near crazy for the last two weeks. With the soccer season officially over, three days of dance …

homemade alphabet book: get personal with the abc’s | early literacy | how to make an abc book | teach kids the letters of the alphabet | teachmama.com

Sometimes, simple is better.  Sometimes, more choices make us more confused. If Maddy, Owen, and Cora were shown an amazing pallet of face paints and were able to choose anything in the world they wanted designed on their cheeks or …

    We have been putting in a lot of pool time lately, but we’ve also been spending a boatload of time indoors–staying cool in the comfort of our ac, eating popsicles and ices, playing games, Wii, and reading. Even …

    I’m not going to lie–some summer days, I really think that if it weren’t for the 15 minutes of Adult Swim, my kids wouldn’t stop moving all day long. Even the rest times that I once relied on …

Sometimes it’s very easy for teachers and parents to feel impatient with emerging readers. It’s hard to listen to kids sound out every word on a page and get through only five words a minute. It’s hard to know what …

According to Rachel and Mary Gabriel, the “schema theory tells us that prior knowledge is essential for comprehension of new knowledge and that learning difficulties can often be traced back to insufficient background knowledge” (Gabriel & Gabriel, “Power in Pictures: …

My kiddos are huge fans of popping pop beads, stringing beads, connecting nuts and bolts, and just sticking things together. Not only are these great activities to help develop kiddos’ fine motor skills, but it shows how connecting–putting things together–is …

By sharing our love of words and talking about new and exciting words, we are teaching our children to become Word Conscious. Word Consciousness is an integral component of language development and one of the early predictors of success in …