I have moved to www.bitsofwisdomforall.com

www.bitsofwisdomforall.com is where you will find all my new posts. Please visit and let me know your comments.

Fun Educational Games

                                               Fun Games that Promote Thinking

While researching educational products to help students learn thinking skills, I came across some great games. Since this is the time of year parents search for great gifts, I thought I would share my findings with you.

In order to make my list of great games, a product must require skill, not luck to win. There must be some strategy and planning involved. Finally, it must be fun and engaging.

All of thesee games can be found at Mindware: www.mindware.com and/or Toys R Us: www.toyrus.com

Games that build visual imaging skills, flexible thinking, and visual discrimination skills:

Q-bitz : Anyone who has taken the WISC IQ test will recognize this game as the Block Design test. I played it with my two children last night and they had lots of fun. My son who has some mild visual issues was a bit frustrated until I showed him how to “see” the relationship between the individual blocks and the design on the cards. Once he understood that he took off. We allowed a handicap for the youngest player of a four block head start to even out the skills difference.

Blik Blok provides 3-D dimensional puzzles to be solved. Visual imaging skills are important for math, writing and reading comprehension. The ability to mentally rotate and “see” how the pieces go together develops the internal visualizations skills used to imagine how to create and develop novel ideas.

Games that build planning and strategy skills. Excellent to help children learn to Stop-Think-Plan-Do.

Gobblet is a hyped up tic-tac-toe game. The goal is the same as tic-tac-toe, to get four in a row, or three in a row on Gobblet Jr. The twist is that you have 4 (or 3) sizes of pieces that can “gobble” up another piece smaller than it. This game is quick to start playing, but your skills can continue to develop as you discover more strategies to win. I think that Gobblet Jr is best for 10 year olds and under. Gobblet is a game everyone can have fun playing.

Mastermind has been around for a while, but it continues to be a favorite. To win quickly, deductive reasoning skills are needed.

Rush Hour is a wonderful one person game. There are a number of puzzle cards, in increasing order of difficulty, to solve.

Connect 4 has become a classic at our office. The challenge of winning depends on the skills of your opponent.

Labyrinth is one of my favorites. I love the way paths are changed when players push their cards on the board. The constantly changing mazes challenge players to re-evaluate their plan after each move.

Othello’s outcome can change at the last minute of the game. Othello rewards players who can think ahead and gain access to key positions on the board.

Games that build flexible thinking skills:

Pix Mix requires players to quickly see visual options available. It is fun to try to see what objects are in the holders. My family laughed out loud at some of the things we thought we saw!

Set requires quick thinking and visual processing. Set builds categorization skills as the players try to get rid of all of their cards by matching them to target cards.



5 Tips for Fast Math

1. Make sure your child understands the concept

• Use Manipulatives ( beans, blocks, pennies) to help build the problems
• Use manipulative to solve the problems
• Solve the problem without manipulative

2. Do a pretest and see what your child already knows.

3. Practice the facts:

• Create flashcards 
• http://www.aplusmath.com/flashcards/Flashcard_Creator.html
• Play games with dice: 
• Use a timer and 2 die, roll the dice and answer out loud. See how many problems can be solved in 1 minute or 2 minutes. Keep a chart and track progress.
• http://www.enasco.com/math/Math+Manipulatives/Dice/
• Play computer games
• Computer math practice:
• http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/Mathmagician/cathymath.html

4. Create worksheets

• Math Worksheet creator:
• http://www.math-worksheets-generator.com/
• http://www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/math/

• Practice writing the answer
• Review errors, demonstrate patterns

5. Practice times facts with pencil and paper

• Horizontal
• Vertical

 

iPhone Entertainment for Kids: Good or Bad?

An  excellent article about children and the iPhone was in The New York Times last Sunday.(www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/fashion/17TODDLERS.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=i%20phone%20for%20toddlers&st=cse ). 

One mother extols the educational value of the phone with the story of how her 3 year old can spell words like "starlight and fireworks".  While parents consider this a demonstration of intellect, educational psychologists are concerned. I like the quote from Jane Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail Colorado: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.”

What's a parent to do? Moderation! We are now living in an age where the computer and electronics are a normal part of life. Hey, there are no building blocks at the restaurant to entertain the kids. So, if you want an adult conversation, electronic toys are great. The thing to remember is that electronics are stimulating a different part of the brain than other activities. The goal is to raise a well-rounded child that can use whole/part concepts to build with blocks as well as use visual/spatial sequencing skills to play a computer building game. 

The New York Times article looks at guidelines by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The recommendation has been that children should not watch any TV until they are past their second birthday. Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media states that the current guidelines view cellphone/computer use as the same as TV. 

As a parent I understand the allure of the iPhone. My concern is that a balance exists between electronic entertainment and other activities. If my son had his choice he would be playing on the computer all the time. Children need time to hang around, be bored and find something to do. When electronic are taken away, children must find something else to do. They can read, if desperate, they may even go outside and bounce a ball or build something out of whatever they can find. One thing I know is that given a choice my son, and most children, will choose electronics over his own imagination. Electronics provide many stimulating activities, and these activities can be educational, but children need equal, if not more, time to be off-line creating their own entertainment.

Spelling Tips

My child's reading fluency has really improved!

When can I expect to see an improvement in his spelling?

This recent question from a parent about her fifth-grade son is an excellent one, and is relevant to many students. Therefore, I'd like to share our answer.

In researching the relationship between reading fluency and spelling skills, we found that reading instruction can improve spelling to a certain degree. But by the upper elementary grades, students must master specific skills in addition to reading fluency to become good spellers. Students need additional spelling instruction because reading fluency and spelling call upon different abilities. Reading fluency measures a student’s ability to read accurately and quickly, while spelling demands that the student correctly hear, combine, and record a word's sounds with the proper letters. On top of this, the student must understand and apply the spelling rules of our language, in which many words are not written exactly as they sound.

Fluent readers have learned the rules of phonics (the sounds each letter symbol makes) and can apply these rules when reading. Additionally, fluent readers can quickly scan a page and recognize each word. Good reading is based on more fundamental skills: phonetic awareness, phonetic memory and rapid naming.

Just like fluent readers, good spellers have mastered the rules of phonics (they know their sounds) and remember those rules when spelling a word. Approximately 80% of words in our language follow phonetic rules. However, the remaining words do not “play fair” phonetically and require knowledge of the exceptions. So good spelling requires even more skills than good reading does: phonetic awareness, phonetic memory, visual processing, visual discrimination, visual memory, and graphomotor (writing) skill.

So how are reading fluency and spelling connected? Research has found that teaching spelling improves reading. The phonetic instruction which is also used to teach spelling is now proven to be the best way to teach reading. However, spelling instruction at the fifth-grade level and above requires more than phonemic awareness. In the K-1 years, spelling can be taught using phonics, but fifth-grade spelling rules require several more complex skills. Louisa Moats (2005/06) has broken down spelling tasks by grade level:

Kindergarten: Teach phonemic awareness, letter sounds and names.

First Grade: Teach consonants and multiple spellings of vowel sounds.

First-Third Grade: Teach irregular words, such as homonyms (to, too, two).

Second Grade: Teach more complex spelling irregularities, such as spelling according to position of the sound in the word (where in the word to use ou or ow; when to use ge or dge for a /j/ sound); and common endings such as -s, -ed,and -ing.

Third Grade: Teach multi-syllable words, including rules of syllabication, (where to break up a word into syllables), compound word(such as cowboy), accent and pronunciation shifts (schwa) when the short u sound is used instead of the original vowel sound (man to human, or the /a/ sound in adapt).

Fourth Grade: Teach Latin-based prefixes, suffixes and roots, such as /pre/ (before) + /nat/ (to be born) = prenatal (before birth).

Fifth Grade: Teach the meanings and spelling of more common Latin-based words. Organize word study around a common root word, once prefixes and suffixes are recognized.

The fifth-grade student who prompted this question has been taught many of these concepts. However, some of the skills required to spell at the fifth-grade level may not yet be automatic for him. While he has learned to recognize and decode words, and so to read well, spelling demands not just recognizing but producing the correct letters in a word. In order to spell a word right, a student must correctly recall its sounds, generate the symbols for those sounds, and apply the spelling rules to make sure the sounds are, in this word, correctly represented by those symbols. Reading offers visual cues that help in decoding, but spelling requires the student himself to produce the auditory, visual and written forms of a word.

So spelling demands more skills than reading does, and therefore requires its own instruction. What to do in the case of this delightful fifth-grader who has improved so much in his reading? He has the phonetic awareness, memory and rapid naming necessary for reading fluently. We now know that he is ready to go beyond the one- and two-syllable spelling rules. He should benefit from the fourth- and fifth-grade curriculum recommended by Louisa Moats. Since we at K&M already teach the prefixes, suffixes and root words to improve vocabulary, we include this program as spelling instruction for our older students.

Visual Skill Affect Learning

Many parents ask me what they can do at home to help their child with reading skills. Schools have been stressing phonic skills (rightly so), but little is done to strengthen visual processing skills.


Reading, writing and math all require strong visual processing skills. To read fluently a child must be able to quick discriminate between letters (b/d, p/q, m/w, s/z), they must also be able to scan across a line of text without skipping up or down a line. Lastly, fluid reader have a strong visual memory for words, so once they have mastered sounding out words they build a sight vocabulary.

Spelling and letter formation require visual memory skills. Visual-spatial skills are needed for math.

All around visual skills are very important to develop. A child with weak visual skills will have to work much harder in school. The web sites below provide an assortment of visual skills. I this helps!

Here are some web sites that can provide vision activities for children that have visual issues.

Provided a variety of types of exercises:
http://www.eyecanlearn.com/#Memory

Visual memory games:
http://www.ababasoft.com/flash_games/memory_visual.html


Games for NLD kids, includes visual
http://www.nldontheweb.org/Games.htm

Rapid naming games
http://www.brainconnection.com/teasers/?main=bc/rn

Game to buy for less than $20
http://visual-memory.qarchive.org/

Games to play at home
http://www2.halton.gov.uk/pdfs/educationandlearning/sen/guidelinesdevvismemory


Hidden pictures: printable
http://www.highlightskids.com/GamesandGiggles/HiddenPics/HiddenPicsPrintable/h8hiddenArchive.asp
http://familyfun.go.com/printables/games/printable/connect-dots-sailboat/

Is it a vision issue or a learning issue?

A parent emailed with this question: George has had eye exams, but I really want to find someone who is good at sorting out how much of his learning issues are vision related and how much is from learning or processing issues.



To tell the difference between a learning issue and a vision issue, you can go one of two ways.


1. Do a vision exam with a eye doctor who believes in vision therapy and who will assess vision skills like tracking, visual discrimination, visual memory and other vision issues which can impact reading and learning skills. This way if no problems are found with visual issues you can take the next step and assess for a learning issue.

If visual issues are identified, you will have the information you need address them. Once the visual issues are addressed there may still be some learning areas that need to be strengthened, but it will be easier now that the visual skills are working better.


2. Have an educational evaluation that includes auditory and visual processing issues including: auditory and visual memory, auditory and visual attention, phonological processing, visual scanning, visual-motor integration, along with reading, writing, math and language ability. This kind of testing usually also includes an WISC IV IQ test, so cognitive abilities can be compared to processing and academic abilities.

This assessment will give a good overall picture of the child's learning strengths and weaknesses. Then a plan can be made to build the weak areas and maximize the strengths.