What GTT Learned in Twelve Years

 After publishing 624 columns, 280,800 words, two books in English and Spanish, and 312 podcasts, the teachers at Grandparents Teach, Too/Learning Through the Seasons are retiring. Iris Katers will continue podcasts on wnmu.org live and online thanks to the help of NMU Public Radio 90.

  Thank you to our families, publishers, editors, and readers throughout the U.S. who helped us inform parents and grandparents of the many ways to prepare their children for school and a lifelong love of learning. Thank you all for sending our column to families around the world and writing to us. 

   Here are some important tips we shared with fathers and grandfathers in the County Detention Center training sessions while we did activities, an experience that all of us found most personally moving. The tips are based on twelve years of research and listening to you.

Useful Tips

·       Conversation is the key, especially during early childhood and middle school—the greatest brain development years Ninety percent of the brain develops between ages 0-5.

·       Give children 100% of your attention when you do activities. Turn off media.

·       Have learning fun together.  It’s the way into their brains.

·       Activities with preschool children should be short. Every child has different abilities and attention span.

·       Read to children every day, including bedtime.  It’s the difference between 3,000 words and 20,000 words to begin school.

·       Explore geography. Visit places around the United States and world in person when you can. Canoe rivers, climb hills, view waterfalls and forests. Visit cities and National Parks.

·       Teach the history and culture of the United States. Tell stories of your family’s history, traditions, culture, resilience and fun times. History is personal.

·       Teach economics and how to make, save, spend, and donate money.

·       Teach how the government works and how people have the responsibility to be involved if we want it to work well.

·       Teach the blessings of liberty.

·       Integrate math into daily life and conversation.

·       Do activities and creative projects with them, not for them.  They are learning even if the outcome is not perfect.

·       Practice the Rule of Six.  Give six praises to one correction. The practice helps develop self- confidence and worth.

·       Teach children to be kind and charitable to others by example.

·       Alternate between noisy and quiet activities. Children need one daily hour of active exercise:  running, jumping, throwing, kicking, hitting a ball, swimming, sledding, walking, hiking…

·       Use a timer for Time In, as well as, Time Out, if you need it.

·       Display art and other products.  Show and give them to others. Use Zoom or others to communicate with family members far away.

·       Take leadership in the family about teaching children skills, preparing for an occupation, building religious, moral principles, and good health, finding happiness, and helping others. Teach the dangers of all kinds of substance abuse, by example.

Thank you all!  Bless you.  Please be safe and well.

More Ideas and Activities....See the authors’ book “Learning Through the Seasons” at area bookstores and grandparentsteachtoo.org. For more help to prepare young children for success in school see the authors’ web site: www.grandparentsteachtoo.org. Also check our audio Podcasts WNMU Radio 90; Youtube video activities; and join us on Pinterestphotos: Fran Darling: fdarling fotos

Thanksgiving Day is Still Thanksgiving

 No matter how we celebrate Thanksgiving Day this year, teaching children to give thanks and be grateful is a critical part of developing a good, kind, and loving person. Thanksgiving is a perfect time for families to spend more discussion time together that builds knowledge, vocabulary and binds the family together. Creating a Thanksgiving book together is a gift in itself. You’ll need several sheets of paper or large paper plates, pencils, crayons, and stapler. Optional are paper punch and yarn. 

Conversation and Creating

   Start by having a conversation with your children about things that both of you are thankful for. Keep it simple! After a few suggestions, sit together and begin to print an “I Am Thankful For… book. Depending on the age of the children, the book can either be dictated or printed by the children. Children just beginning to print can tell you the words. You can carefully print them on paper, and they can copy the proper spelling and letter formation.   Keeping with the Thanksgiving theme, help your child trace their handprint to make a turkey outline on a few sheets of paper or plates. The thumb curves away from the fingers to make a head. This is a good time to talk about the makeup of turkeys with very young children. Turkeys have two wings and legs. They have a flap of skin on their necks called a wattle. Since they have feathers, they are birds. Young children can print one word on each turkey that represents something to be thankful for. Some children will attempt sounds they know; others can write the whole word or short sentence while younger ones need to dictate the words to you. Then children can illustrate their book. After completing several pages, add a cover and assemble the book.  Print the title, author, and illustrator’s name on the cover. Now you are ready to cuddle and share this book your children can read. Encourage other families to make their own books.  Then on Thanksgiving Day find a way to share your love and gratitude. Americans are an inventive creative people.  We always find a way or way around.

Thanksgiving Skills

  How does this help your children? Writing involves creative thinking. Forming letters correctly, tracing and coloring all help develop fine motor skills. This also models the idea that writing has a purpose and showing gratitude is a wonderful social skill. A good book for a read aloud is “I’m Thankful Each Day” by P.K. Hallinan. Use this idea to write books throughout the year about the changing seasons, holidays, science learning, our great country, and our love for each other. They also make precious gifts for grandparents who are far away.

More Ideas and Activities....See the authors’ book “Learning Through the Seasons” at area bookstores and grandparentsteachtoo.org. For more help to prepare young children for success in school see the authors’ web site: www.grandparentsteachtoo.org. Also check our audio Podcasts WNMU Radio 90; Youtube video activities; and join us on Pinterest

Photos, Fran Darling, fdarling fotos

Making Math Count for Youngsters

  Life is like a math equation. In order to gain the most, you have to know how to convert negatives into positives—unknown

   

 Families can use everyday activities to help children prepare for math in school and have a life- long awareness, understanding, skill and good attitude toward numbers and problem solving with numbers.  Here are a few family activities to begin.

Grocery Store Math

   Grocery shopping is an ideal place to use math skills.  Young children can look through grocery ads and learn to read the numbers. They can look for prices of fruits, vegetables nutrition bars, yogurt, and other things they like to eat. Point out money signs in the store. You can play grocery store often at home with real or plastic food and play money. Take turns being the cashier.

  Review numbers while choosing groceries looking at prices of apples to reinforce decimals and compare cost of items. While many items no longer have individual sticker prices, there are often signs for sale prices.

   With older children you can teach them to round off numbers and add or multiply. For example, your child can round up to $3.00 and figure out about how much two cartons would be.  Talk about how we arrived at that number. Point out how the estimate differs from the true cost. Estimation is very useful in life.

 Cooking math 

  The kitchen is a great place to practice math, as long as, there's an adult around to supervise. Half and double recipes.  Drop dough 5x7 on a cookie sheet.  What is the total?  Count how many pepperonis are on the pizza?  If there are three people in your family divide nine strawberries equally among them. How many strawberries will each person receive?

Mapping

  Show children how to use all the forms of on-line Google maps directions, and Google earth. Tap on street view to find their house. Tap on the search icon, navigator wheel and others to explore from your kitchen table. You can even plan local road trips to find water falls or look at the depth of the Great Lakes shoreline. Search for free National Geographic geography games for kids. Paper maps work, too.

 Change up

   Teach children to recognize the value of coins early. They can start a penny collection and read the dates on the coins. They can use pennies to count by ones, nickels to count by fives, and dimes to count by tens. Four quarters equal a dollar. Do a little at a time.

  Put a piece of fruit on the table and teach to count out the price of 45 cents.  Start counting with pennies.  When they are ready use other coins.

More Ideas and Activities....See the authors’ book “Learning Through the Seasons” at area bookstores and grandparentsteachtoo.org. For more help to prepare young children for success in school see the authors’ web site: www.grandparentsteachtoo.org. Also check our audio Podcasts WNMU Radio 90; Youtube video activities; and join us on Pinterest

Photos, Fran Darling, fdarling fotos

Sketches: Mark Nowicki

Increasing Math Awareness Pays Off

 We have heard: read, read, read every day. Perhaps families should also say do math, math, math every day. It’s just as fun. You can increase your child's awareness of numbers by looking around the house to find examples: the kitchen clock, the calendar, a cereal box, a TV dial, a stamp or inside shoes. Children can write down the numbers they see. Give them a number and ask them to look around the house for examples of the number. Boost your older children’s awareness of how numbers are used by pointing out weather forecasts and sports statistics in the newspaper or on-line.

Estimate -- Estimation is one way to increase children’s number sense. Before placing a stack of folded towels on a shelf or filling a bowl with apples, ask to estimate how many will fit. Then count afterward to compare the actual number to the estimate. Helping children learn to make appropriate predictions will help them see how numbers are used in everyday life. Learning to ask, "Is my answer reasonable?" will help them tackle math problems in the classroom.

Concept of one hundred --Understanding the concept of 100 is difficult for young children, even if they can count that far. Suggest that children start making collections of 100 things - rubber bands, watermelon seeds, pebbles or Legos. You can divide the objects in groups of 10 or 2 or 5 to see how these smaller groups add up to 100 in different ways. Glue seeds onto a piece of colored construction paper for a math collage. Seeing 100 will help them conceptualize it.

 Unlock the code --Help children recognize numbers and think critically by using mysteries. Write out all the letters in the alphabet on a sheet of paper, leaving room underneath each letter for a number. Under each letter, write the numbers from 1 to 26. In other words, a=1, b=2, etc. Practice writing coded messages using numbers rather than letters. You can use the code to leave simple messages.

How Tall? --Many families record the height of their children on a door or wall chart. If you do the same for everyone in the family, your children can join in the measuring and see how the heights compare. Measurement and understanding relationships between numbers are crucial to the development of mathematical thinking.

What's on the menu? -- At a restaurant ask children to find the least expensive item on the menu, then all the items that cost between $5 and $10 or three items whose total cost is between $9 and $20. This will not only fill the time while you're waiting to eat, it will show your children how math is used every day.

More Ideas and Activities....See the authors’ book “Learning Through the Seasons” at area bookstores and grandparentsteachtoo.org. For more help to prepare young children for success in school see the authors’ web site: www.grandparentsteachtoo.org. Also check our audio Podcasts WNMU Radio 90; Youtube video activities; and join us on Pinterest

photos: Fran Darling, fdarling fotos