S – P – E – L – L – I – N – G: It's a Sport!
ESPN – that's where I caught the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I was reluctantly coaxed into watching the bee. I avoid television, and watching kids spell on stage sounded boring. I was wrong. I was riveted. We played along. We all know that good spelling is a key part of written communication skills, but practicing spelling is not usually seen as F-U-N. I witnessed kids and adults get excited about building spelling skills after watching the bee.
The Blue Lake take on it:
Don't wait. Watch a spelling bee movie with your kids this weekend. We highly recommend Spellbound, the Oscar-nominated documentary of the 1999 National Spelling Bee, and Akeelah and the Bee, a moving, fictional account of an 11 year-old girl's journey from a troubled home to Scripps. You will be hooked. Then, you will want to start with the most common 1,000 words, move on to spelling coach tips from a UK English teacher, and maybe even play the online spelling bee game at the site of Broadway Musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee."
Now is the time to start a really long book! If you have young kids that are early readers, show them how much you like to read. Go back to your childhood favorites and read aloud to them. They may be dated, but what captured your imagination will likely capture theirs. In our team we remember Nancy Drew, The Happy Hollisters, and almost any collection of scary stories. Try to find them at your library or on ebay (we are assuming you didn't keep them all)!
Lots of products promise that they can build your child's cognitive skills. The adjective "cognitive" is defined by Merriam Webster dictionary as "relating to or involving intellectual activity". Examples of cognitive behavior are "thinking, reasoning, or remembering". In other words, cognitive behavior is the natural behavior exhibited by young children. Cognitive theory says that young children build mental maps to make sense in their environments. An experience that is repeated fits easily into the child's mental map and that's cognitive structure. If the experience is different or new, the child's mind will alter his or her cognitive structure to accommodate the new conditions. This way, the child erects more and more adequate cognitive structures.
A number of schools and HeadStart programs are adopting new digital and paper methods of determining whether preschoolers are developing reading skills at an appropriate pace. The purpose is to identify and attack the problems early, when they are easiest to correct. "Once a child falls behind, it's very difficult to catch up," says Dr. Angela Fawcett of the University of Sheffield in England. Fawcett led a study that found that a small amount of extra tutoring given to preschoolers with language delays-- an hour a week in small groups for 10 weeks -- boosted their skills. The gain exceeded what a year's worth of remediation at age 7 or 8 would produce, she said.
Well before a child learns to form letters with a marker or pencil, she has taken many steps toward learning to write. Children need many opportunities to use their hands to do various things before they can successfully print letters. Squeezing play dough, building a tower of legos, stringing beads and completing a knobbed puzzle are some of the ways children practice for later writing. A child who shows no interest in writing or who doesn’t have proper pencil grip is probably not ready to do so. Children enjoy learning a new skill only when they are ready for it. Getting ready is just as important as mastering the skill.
Comic books can spark an early reader’s interest – the excitement of the graphics and the action-packed plots draw in children who normally think of reading as boring or too hard. And comics can lead to success as an adult. "My preschool fascination with comics meant that I could read by the time I entered the first grade," says Mike Richardson, the founder of Dark Horse Comics whose earliest passions included Batman and Spiderman. Mike started Dark Horse 20 years ago, and now they employ 100 people. Products include Star Wars, Sock Monkey and The Escapists.
