Ask yourself, “What can I do today to
make a difference in my child's life?”
Today it was leaving a half folded
basket of laundry to read books with my baby.
Our gems of literacy today were all by Matthew Van Fleet. Tails,
Dogs, Cats, Alphabet.
A side note here: my baby loves to sort
laundry into piles so long as I help him to know what goes in each pile. Laundry just became a great game!
Other times it is simply allowing my
schedule to take a backseat to driving some trains on the rug, making various
machine sounds with my baby miming along.
Today Andrew was feeling rather mischievous
and threw his sister's favorite Ever After High Doll into the bathtub. After I said, "No!" sternly to my baby, he dissolved into
sobs.
I held out my arms and he ran to me and
wouldn't look up until I had rocked him into security with love. I finally was able to connect to him by
playing the game “Where is ?”
I asked him where his feet were in a
whisper. He touched his toes. Next I asked him where his leg, belly, arm,
and nose were. Afterwards I asked him
where mommy's nose was and he giggled gleefully clutching onto my nose. Just like that it was ok.
Speaking of the Ever After High
Dolls...here is some advice for anyone with a type A 1st grader who was
refusing to read her timed sheets homework and 20 min of reading.
Sarah loves to be read to but was truly
struggling to read aloud unless it was on her time frame. That is all nice and dandy but the acceptable
mood necessary to read was becoming less and less frequent. Rather than constantly battle with tantrums,
I would let her read a sentence, paragraph, or page and then I would match it
with the same until we finished our quota.
Jim Trelease has a great resource called the Read Aloud Handbook to find books appropriate for many age levels.
I also volunteered to read with my
daughter's reading group at the school once a week and brought in seasonal
books from home (approved by the teacher of course) to keep it exciting. We discovered all 1st graders were astounded
with pop up books.
As I worked with these kids I helped
coordinate a writing experiment. I
brought in a basket of things and let each child select 3 things. Next I asked them to make up a story using
the 3 items. I recorded it on my voice
recordings in my phone and later transcribed them. A dear friend also translated them to Spanish
so all the families could enjoy the stories.
I had each student illustrate a picture to coordinate with their
story. We sent them to a self-publishing
house and Voila!
Every one of these students is now a
published author! I can't tell you the
pride and confidence these kids have accrued through this process. We have coordinated these books with a school
wide young author fair and author visit writing workshop and literacy night.
This also worked beautifully with my 4
year old. Her imaginative narrative with
sea shells far exceeded the tales of the 1st graders. Try it out!
How does this come back to Ever After
High dolls? Well I had previously
attempted reading small chapter books to my Sarah but she would never really
pay attention until Christmas. I
purchased all four Ever After High Books and several dolls and wrapped them for
my daughter. We have now read through an
entire novel with all her sisters and have started on a second. My daughter has tripled her reading
requirement for the term and is bubbling to write a book report on this novel.
My advice: Be involved with your child's
education. Meet them at where ever they
are and unlock the magic that comes with knowledge! Start today and know you are enough to
embolden, enrich, and radiate love and forgiveness for your child, so Shine On
Mom!
Stacey
