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As I have often mentioned on the weekly emails, it is important to have dialogues with your child about what they have been learning in class. The weekly summaries are highlights of what we have been doing at school and the terminology that I use in class to help as conversation starters between you and your child. In class, I always tell the students that everything I teach is for a reason and if they are unclear of that reason, they need to ask. My lessons are not only connected to previous lessons, but are relatable to the world around them, creating an anchor to the concepts I have been teaching. In essence, these create a foundational skillset to what I teach and to the things they will learn throughout their lives. Relating what I teach to the world around them helps them integrate their learning and propel them forward and become lifelong learners. Learning can happen anywhere and you have to be ready to embrace those opportunities. However, if you are unaware and are not open to those opportunities, that opportunity to learn something will vanish. We need to nurture that sense of curiosity and a sense of wonder by encouraging our kids to embrace them. There is no magic fairy that transforms that curiosity. Therefore, it needs to be nurtured.

In addition to helping our children become lifelong learners, there are a few other reasons conversations with your children are important. Please keep in mind that when they are talking, it is important listen to them attentively so you can ask for clarification or ask them to elaborate on their thoughts. Our brains can only do one thing well at a time. If we are doing more than one thing at a time, it means that we are not doing anything well. Please note: if you expect your child to pay attention to you, it is only fair that you reciprocate and model the behaviour your would like to see yourself.

Firstly, the conversations can help your child solidify their learning. If your child is able to talk about what they did and learned at school, this will help them to sort through the information as they explain their thinking and their learning. By being able to explain, reiterate the ideas of the lessons, and make connections to the world around them means that they have understood the concept. I have provided recaps and photos of the lessons to help give some background information.

Secondly, conversing with family helps your child develop and strengthen their oral language skills through expressing and communicating their thoughts. We have to remember that parents were the first teachers the children had and parents continue to be those teachers who are an important resource to what each child learns. When children are conversing with family, they are learning to organize their thoughts and ideas so they can articulate what they want to say.

Thirdly, having to organize their thoughts requires integrating the vocabulary and all of the knowledge they have. By articulating their thoughts, they are developing their skill of elaborating on details, incorporating parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. All of these ultimately help with the writing process, as writing is essentially putting thoughts down on paper. The better we become at articulating our thoughts, the stronger we become as writers.

Fourth, conversing with others and having to organize their thoughts before speaking helps with the writing process. When children listen to others speak, especially adults, they are usually listening to experienced oral speakers use the correct syntax and vocabulary. Hearing the correct sentence structure helps the children transfer that to their own writing and reading. The more they practice conversing with others, the better writers they will become.

This skill of communicating thoughts and ideas does not magically happen. It has to be nurtured, developed, and practiced. By instilling this at a young age, children will be able to strengthen this skill as they grow older, and as mentioned above, strengthening their writing skills. Acquiring new knowledge happens to each and every one of us. Knowledge does not happen through osmosis. As adults, we tend to engage in conversation with others by inquiring and having meaning back-and-forth dialogue about the topic. However, this skill of engaging in conversation happens naturally because it is something that we have been doing for a long time.

Keeping this in mind, we need to help children do the same. Moreover, this ability to discuss thoughts and ideas helps us to apply and extend our learning to the world around us. Through dialogue, the knowledge becomes grounded by helping us to connect to the things we already know. Finding the connections and relationships between concepts and ideas help to bring a relational aspect to that knowledge. For example, multiplication is not different from addition. In fact, addition and multiplication are significantly intertwined as multiplication is ‘quick way of adding the same number’. Multiplication is a progression that is extended from addition and understanding the progressions that occur between addition and multiplication helps us to solidify that knowledge. From there, multiplication can now be recognized as the basis of many other concepts such as fractions, percentages, ratios, proportions and so on. Again, discussion helps us to integrate what we know to what we are learning. This is where reflecting and critical thinking skills are happening, expanding on the confidence and gaining a sense of wanting to learn more, which is the ultimate goal of lifelong learning.

Along the same lines, connecting knowledge will help to strengthen comprehension of both spoken and written materials. Having conversations with children helps them to organize what is being heard or read into coherent thoughts and ideas so they can respond appropriately verbally and through writing. Progressing from here is when they begin to read independently. Will they be able to comprehend (understand the text)? Will they be able to answer comprehension questions beyond basic recall of information? Will they be able to think critically or feel motivation to learning more? Again, this does not happen magically. It is up to the adults in the children’s lives to help nurture and guide them to becoming critical thinkers.

Finally, encourage your child to answer in full sentences. Often when we ask our children what they want, they respond with just that direct answer. For example, “What do you want to eat?” is answered with a “pizza” or “noodles”. However, pizza is just a word with no context. Encouraging our child to answer with, “I would like pizza, please,” or “I want pizza please,” puts a context and information. As I mentioned in the January blog about “Fostering Responsibility”, our decisions as parents have lasting implications. Something that many teachers see in students is the struggles that they have with writing. Writing is simply putting down our thoughts. However, not being to articulate our thoughts is the first struggle. Secondly, writing with proper grammar is also a struggle that most students face. If we encourage our children to speak in full sentences, writing will also become easier for them.

As we begin the second half of the school year, it is great to see how the students have grown in so many ways and are continuing to develop. As I mentioned in the January post “Nurturing the Steps to Success: Encourage a Growth Mindset”, (Ms. S. Sokugawa – Relationships are the key to learning. (sd41blogs.ca) being parents requires us to make decisions that can have positive or negative implications for our children. That is why the decisions that we make as parents need to be made with good intentions, understanding that our decisions have lasting implications even though we may not see them at that moment. Parents are the first teachers children have and parents continue to teach as the children grow. As I mentioned a the Parents as Partners meeting, parents need to role model the behaviour we want to see in our children. Also, fostering (nurturing) and instilling a sense of responsibility is one of those important characteristics that we hope our children will possess one day. After all, our children will continue to be our children no matter how old they grow. However, they will be adults for longer than they were children, so we must remember that the foundations we give our children must last throughout their lives. We must remember that responsibility does not magically occur with a wave of a wand, but is something that must be developed and nurtured over time through practice and experience. We must allow our children to do things even though it may not be the way we expect it to be done.

Encouraging a growth mindset, as mentioned in the January post, (Ms. S. Sokugawa – Relationships are the key to learning. (sd41blogs.ca) helps with fostering their responsibility to learn from each experience. That is why guiding and encouraging our children to do things for themselves rather than doing it for them is an important way children learn and grow. Safety is always paramount, but if your child is not in immediate danger, let them do it. An easy example is letting them carry they own backpacks. They do not have textbooks in their backpacks and need to learn to be responsible for their things. Of course, carrying your child’s backpack is easy for parents to do (parents have been carrying bags for a long time), but what are the children learning from this experience? Ironically, I have heard many parents say to their children when they are about thirteen years old, “Why aren’t you responsible?” How do the children become responsible when they haven’t had the chance to learn? Again, there is no magic wand that miraculously turns the children into responsible individuals.

Further, without making mistakes, improvement and learning cannot follow. The role as the loving adults in the children’s lives is to guide, encourage, teach, and redirect as we see fit.  We do not want to make the same mistakes repetitively, because this means we haven’t learned the lesson. If this happens, we need to help them look for what went wrong and figure out how to do it differently. Generally, making mistakes helps to strengthen our problem-solving skills by allowing us to figure out what we did wrong and what needs to be changed for next time. However, sometimes more guidance is needed and that is what we as parents need to be ready for. Standby and watch and only intervene when necessary. If we do things for our child, we have actually taken away, or stolen, an opportunity that our child could have had.  Experience is a key to building responsibility. Therefore, giving our children opportunities to build responsibility is important and a necessity for their future and future well-being. If your child has never experienced an obstacle  while they are young, what are they going to do when they are older and have more difficult challenges? They will face difficulty in knowing where to begin and what to do as well as navigating their emotional outcome.  Information in and regurgitated out does not imply that learning has taken place. Learning means that we apply the knowledge we have encountered and therefore if we do not apply that knowledge, learning has not taken place.

Before change can occur, our perception needs to be examined so we can be informed and change our perception. If you are interested in further reading, I have added two suggestions.

 The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson gives strategies on how to nurture the developing mind of your child. A different perspective to what we may have grown up with.

 Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn is an older book, but a good read. Kohn looks at rewards as a punishment since ‘change’ only comes about to gain just the reward but does not bring about real change. Change has to be intrinsic and occur because change is the goal, not gaining the reward. According to Kohn, giving rewards becomes the soul goal for the change and when the reward is no longer desirable, then behaviour goes back to what is was. The incentive became the motivator and the reward was the guiding factor. This means that learning did not taken place. Therefore, what was the point in putting that effort in if the behaviour does not change for the better and remain?

I have provided a link to Alfie Kohn’s book.

Punished by Rewards – (Book)

The saying ‘Life is a journey’ is often used when talking about our experiences and our learning. In order to make some understanding of this statement, we need to figure out what each word means. As parents, we have a difficult but rewarding job of nurturing our children so they will develop into responsible, contributing members of the society they will be a part of. As I mentioned at the Parents as Partners meeting and in the November blog post, what the nurturing parents do for their children up to the age of 18 is very crucial in helping their children navigate their world for the remaining years of their lives. Remembering that our parents provided those nurturing years for us, we now need to do the same for our children. A lack of guidance during those foundational years can lead to challenging times for our children. Not allowing our children to encounter both pleasant and unpleasant experiences is unfair and unwise. If children have not encountered difficult and challenging situations because the challenges were ‘smoothed out’ or ‘eliminated’ by the parents, how will they be able to handle something more difficult when they are adults and expected to overcome them? When children are adults, there are circumstances where there is an expectation for these young adults to handle the situation. However, if these young adults have never had the opportunity to experience the situation prior to the one they are currently in because their parents eliminated the uncomfortable opportunities when children were young, parents have now done a very big disservice to their children. It is important to think about possible future implications when we make decisions for our children. As I mentioned before, if safety is not an issue, allow your child to experience it as it will give them skills to make them stronger.

Life is a journey that begins at a young age. As parents, it is our responsibility to provide a variety of opportunities so our children can experience a vast variety of them. Ensuring that we allow our children ample opportunities, even though the opportunities may be challenging, will help our children to gain new skills while strengthening the skills they already have. We also need to model this by embracing opportunities ourselves whenever they arise. The conversations we have with our children about what they learn  at school also help to elicit opportunities to enhance their critical thinking by integrating what they learn in school to the world around them.

To embrace each experience, we need to consider that learning is like a never-ending staircase. Please note that for every skill we develop we have a separate staircase for each skill. The concept of the staircase helps to visualize the individual steps, and therefore if we become good at a skill we improve and climb up the steps in the staircase. Each step is slightly higher than a regular step, so it requires a bit of work to go up each one. This staircase is parallel to the concept of Growth Mindset, created by Carol Dweck [Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets (fs.blog) ]. This never-ending staircase of learning allows us to go in either direction as necessary. If we get stronger, we climb up a step or two, but we have opportunities to go back a step or two to retrace where we have come from if we need more practice.  Without making mistakes, we cannot learn and become better than where we were before we made our mistakes.  They are the glitches that are needed for learning to occur and to improve what we are doing.  The most important part, however, is what we learn from those glitches.  By looking more closely at where we went wrong, we can then figure out what we can do differently.  IF we do this step, it means we are truly learning, and will not repeat the same mistake over and over again.

Encouraging a growth mindset begins with how we phrase comments. When making comments to children, it is important to validate them and their efforts with comments that will encourage them to keep trying and persevering, even when things get difficult or result in unexpected ways. Comments such as “You’re smart” or “You are really good at that” stifle the motivation to try as the child may feel that they are already smart and do not need to go beyond what they are already doing. Instead, comments such as, “I see that you tried really hard in printing that word” or “I can see you are improving in your reading.” For further examples, you can click on the following link. Growth Mindset For Parents | Growth Mindset Parenting (mindsetworks.com)

Since we began our school year, I have continually emphasized how the frequently used words (sight words) and phonemic awareness are the “secrets to reading AND writing”. Sometimes it is hard for students to see this as they are learning to read and write, but the more they practice and continue to learn, this will become evident. Phonological awareness is the integration of all the phonemes (sounds), vowels, digraphs, rules, syllables (closed, open, vowel team, r-controlled, diphthong) in how words are spelled. We will continue to learn these rules as the year progresses. In the meantime, please continue to have your child review the frequently used words (sight words). An updated list can be found on the “Our Learning (Literacy)” under the “Frequently Used Words” heading.

As in the message conveyed in the story, “The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants” by Priscilla Turner, stringing only consonants simply makes sounds and noises. However, when consonants and vowels are used together, they create words. Stringing several words together creates sentences, and when we have several sentences together, we can make paragraphs. The more familiar students become with these components, the stronger they will be as they progress through the grades. These are the foundational skills needed to become not only proficient readers, but proficient writers as well. For this reason, it is important that you child know all of the basic phonemes that were taught from the middle of September to the middle of November. Continue to have conversations with your child about the phonemic lessons they have been learning. Please see the “Our Learning (Literacy)” page under the “Phonemic Awareness” heading to refer to, to help you with these conversations. Also, encourage your child to look for these when your are out and about around the community (e.g., reading street signs, store windows and awnings, billboards).

The English we know and use is a tricky language as it is a combination of different languages (German, Greek, Latin). Each of these languages brings their own rules and therefore, we need to navigate through them to become proficient. There are many exceptions to the rules we know in addition to many homophones. The more we read, the more vocabulary we develop, which helps to strengthen our skills. There is spell check but if we are not sure which witch to use or which there, their, or they’re to use, the spell checker will be useless. I have noticed that “your” and “you’re” are often interchanged in text messages I receive (from adults). For this reason, it is crucial to not only continue encouraging our children to read many kinds of books but also be aware of how the words are composed (which phonemes, vowels, digraph, rules, and syllables (closed, open, vowel team, r-controlled, diphthong) are in the words). It is important to be aware of what is happening in words and to not take this skill for granted. And as noted in the book, The Magic of Letters by Tony Johnston, knowing the letters and how they work is the like unlocking the magic to a world of print.

At the age your child is at, it is hard to imaging that they will be an adult in the not too distant future. As I mentioned at the Parents As Partners open house, our responsibility as parents is to ensure that our children will be ready to take on whatever adulthood brings for them. Whether your child is ready or not, that day will inevitably present itself. Therefore, we (parents) must ensure that our children are armed with the essential foundations that will help carry them throughout their adulthood.

Reiterating what I showed you on one of my slides during the presentation, childhood lasts from birth to eighteen years of age. During those eighteen years, there are a few stages of development that our children will experience (infancy, toddler, childhood, adolescence). Regardless of whether they are ready or not, they will be adults at age 18. As parents, our support for our children lasts our lifetime and we will always be their parents. However, your child will have to take responsibility for their actions once they have reached the age of 18, which can be positive or negative. We can help them to navigate  what to do but ultimately they will have to take responsibility for their actions. Remember that if your child lives to be 100 years old, those first 18 years (18% of their life) must carry them for the remaining 82 years (82% of their life). If they live to be 90 years old, those first 18 years (20% of their life) must carry them for the remaining 72 years (80% of their life). If they live to be 80 years old, the first 18 years (22% of their life) must carry them for the remaining 62 years (78% of their life). This means that the basic foundational skills they learn in the first part of their life (childhood) needs to be solid so they can do well throughout their lifetime.

The essential foundations necessary to become productive and do well in life are skills such as demonstrating responsibility, maintaining an open mindset (growth mindset), perspective taking, being confident with the choices they make, showing respectful behaviour towards others, and being resilient. However, being able to do these skills does not happen magically. Instead, they are skills that have to be encouraged, nurtured, and practiced many, many times as they grow older. By allowing our child the opportunities, no matter how small (holding their own backpack, doing chores around the house, picking up after themselves) begins the process of building these essential skills. Yes, it is easier (and faster) for adults to do these instead of waiting for your child to do it, but in essence you are taking away a learning opportunity from your child. It is  easier for us to do it because we have done them so many times, but what is this teaching your child? Even ensuring that we arrive to school on time everyday is helping to practice arriving on time for work, events, or engagements we have made with acquaintances.

Without experiencing the whole situation, there is an unclear understanding of what can happen and what natural consequences may occur, be it positive or negative. As I mentioned, safety is always paramount but if safety is not an issue, allow your child the opportunity to experience it rather than taking or robbing them of that experience. If we are always navigating and resolving an issues they encounter, how will they know how to handle it if it happens again? Further, natural consequences such as having to wait, disagreements with others, losing a game, or things not going the way we had wanted or expected are things that happen in life frequently. If our children have not encountered these kinds of ‘hiccups’ as a child, what will  happen when they encounter something more serious when they are older? Being able to navigate the small bumps helps us to gain experience and strengthen our problem solving skills. This is how we build resilience. As parents, we can help our child navigate what to do by giving suggestions and encouragement, but we should not do it for them. Again, if safety is not an issue, allow your child to experience the opportunity. After all, “experience is your best teacher”.

Finally, role modeling the behaviour we want to see in our child is extremely important. Watching and mimicking others is a part child development that happens to all of us. We are born to watch and hear things and copy  and mimic everything we see and hear. This is how we learn to do things. As we grow older, we use our learned knowledge to progress and we continue to acquire new knowledge by following what we see and hear. As I said in my presentation, children’s hearing is really sharp when they are little and therefore they can hear many things, even when we think they cannot hear. Please be mindful of what you say and do  as your child is listening and watching what you say and do. Therefore, please role model the behaviour you want to see in your child. Further, another reason to role model desired behaviour is if you tell them to do something and you do not follow what you are asking them to do, they will lose trust in you and that would be tragic.

The act of reading is a very complex task, especially for the young reader. As adults, we sometimes forget all the necessary components for reading to occur. For many of us, we have been reading for a long time, and since we have been doing it for a long time, we forget how we learned and feel that things just ‘happened naturally’.

However, reading is a very complex task. There are essentially two components to reading. The first component is decoding. This is where the emerging reader learns the mechanics of the reading process and happens to be where most grade 1 students are at. The second, and more essential component, is the comprehension. Comprehension is understanding what the words are trying to convey. As emerging readers, the decoding is a crucial step and the main focus so that when the reader becomes stronger, the focus can then turn to comprehension, which is actually the key component in reading and ultimately learning the material.

One component essential to the emerging reader is becoming acquainted with the “frequently used words” (sight words or common words). These are the cards with the “word of the day” that your children have been bringing home since we began school in September. Unfortunately, many of the words in early readers and board books do not follow the phonemic rules. For example, words such as the, of, because, said, some, have, cannot be sounded out phonetically and must be memorized. Therefore, consistent repetition of these words is an essential step in helping to build reading fluency. One way this repetition can be done is by having your child read the flashcards frequently and consistently. Another way is by looking at and reading books with your child often so that when they can recognize these words in print. This will help your child to better transfer that understanding more contextually as they see the words in the books. Therefore, reading with parents, older siblings, and other adults will help this transformation take place. As an aside, once your child knows the words, continual practice is recommended as knowing the words is an essential part to the writing process. Learning to spell the words is not necessary, but familiarity with the words will help tyour child to use them once we begin writing more independently in our class.

Another component to decoding is phonemic awareness. This is our focus presently and needs to become a solid foundation before reading can take place. Phonemic awareness is knowing the individual sounds (phonemes) that a word makes to help in sounding out unfamiliar words. The phonemes can be the individual letter sounds, digraphs, vowel team syllables, or r-controlled syllables combined with an understanding of the heard vowels when saying the word (i.e.  closed syllable, open syllable, magic e). The more familiar a reader is with the phonemes the easier reading becomes.

Once a reader has an understanding of the sight words and phonemic awareness, fluency will begin to emerge. Fluency is the flow in which the words are read and this cannot occur if the reader has to stop and sound out each word. That is why recognition of the sight words is crucial to building fluency.

This phonemic awareness helps to build the vocabulary and an understanding that words follow certain rules. The sight words and an understanding of phonemic awareness is not only important in building stronger readers, but also becomes helpful during the writing process especially when it comes to homophones. The spell check function does not detect an incorrect use of there, their, or they’re even though the word is spelled correctly. Again, the more books and stories read, the greater the knowledge and spelling skills.

As readers become stronger, it is important that reading continues to be modelled so that other cues continue to be strengthened by reading aloud to them. Reading according to the punctuation is necessary so that correct meaning can be conveyed. Voice inflection and expression are also needed to gather the correct information. Further, dialogue and conversations about the material helps to strengthen the overall understanding of what was read. Asking various questions about the story helps children to recall, reflect, and think about what was read. Although audio books and stories are good in listening to reading being modelled, the interactions with other people through the conversation that occurs about the story ultimately strengthens children’s learning.

Welcome to another school year. I hope that the transition back to routines has gone smoothly. As we begin a new school year, please remember that you (parents) and I (classroom teacher) are a team in the growth and development of your precious children. I feel privileged that I am your child’s teacher this year.

Our job as the community of adults surrounding the children we care for is to provide a safe and nurturing environment so that children can grow into strong, successful, self-sufficient, resilient members of the community.  One of the ways we can help our children is to be supportive when adversity or challenges come their way. It is important that we help our children by encouraging them to look for possible solutions rather than doing it for them.  It is true that we do not want to see our children hurt. However, if it is a challenge that they can overcome with no harm, we need to allow them the opportunity to face it and let them experience it. Safety, of course is paramount, and it may also be painful as caregivers to watch, but how will children learn if they are not allowed to experience it? Not being able to deal with each challenge, especially when they are capable of overcoming them with encouragement and support, will be much worse as the challenges become more difficult. As they grow older, the challenges will become more complex, but if they have not been allowed to face easier challenges and build their problem solving skills, how will they be able to encounter more challenging ones?  The best way to help your child is allowing your child to ‘do it themselves’ and standby to encourage and support them. If they need consoling, standby with caring words and help them talk it out. Help your child to see what happened and how they can change things for the next time to not experience the same feeling again.  Making mistakes is a critical part of learning. If we continue to do what we already know over and over again, how is this developing them to become stronger and gain and strengthen their skills? Working out what happened, reflecting back on what went wrong, and looking at what can be done differently the next time is where the learning takes place.  It is important for children to encounter challenges and hiccups along the way so they can build resilience. Resilience is not something that happens magically with a wave of a wand. It is built through encouragement and strengthened with support, guidance, and encouragement. Being able to face the challenge, learn from it, and bounce back stronger is what we want our kids to be. After all, building resilient children who will become stronger adults ready to embrace any situation is our goal as caregivers.