Preschool Powol Packets

Deck the halls! Or at least the tables! These fun Christmas preschool printables are free and ready to use! You will find dozens of pages with our preschool favorites, like dot pages, dot-to-dots, shadow matching, games, and more! You can click on either the image or the list below!                      Stocking Dot to Dot B is for Bells Dot Page Candy Cane Matching Cards Find the Hidden Ornaments Holiday Shadow Matching North Pole Train Game Snowman Christmas Counting Christmas Which One is Different? Cards Which Ornament is Different? Christmas Tracing Fun I Spy...Christmas Trees Are you looking for more hands-on Christmas activities? I have arts, crafts, science, and more all in our Preschool Christmas Theme HERE !   And if you're looking for something with a religious approach, check out this Advent curriculum full of science: Happy Educating, Carla Have you seen  HEEP ? It

Are professional development or child development courses on your "to-do list?" If so, this Thanksgiving break is a great time to take incredible courses that fit YOUR schedule from the leader in early childhood training! The Best Early Childhood Training Provider: If you've been here for a while, you know that I've taken several courses from ChildCare Education Institute , including  Sensational Science ,  Active Learning in Early Childhood ,  Building Literacy Through Nursery Rhymes and Children's Poetry , and  Bright Beginnings: Age Appropriate Activities for Infants and Toddlers .  Every single course was well organized and contained useful information that was easy to apply immediately! I am happy to recommend them completely! ChildCare Education Institute (CCEI) makes getting professional development super easy because their web-based programs are available 24-7 --all the time--even over Thanksgiving break! I've noticed that the hours for

If you've been following along with the How to Teach Reading series , you know that this is the final article! We laid the ground work with Pre-Reading for Preschoolers in Part 1 , we discussed how to tell if your child is ready to read in Part 2 , and now we are going to cover how to actually teach your child to read! The good news is that once your child shows all the readiness signs I discussed in Part 2 , there are literally a million different ways to teach him or her how to actually read!   And for the most part, they all work! Some work better than others, though, and that's what we're going to discuss here. Research shows that the best reading instruction combines 3 elements: word study, phonics and decoding, and meaningful stories. This means that your reading lessons should include sounding out skills (word families, word meanings, rhyming, etc) AND sight words AND meaningful stories with these first two elements in them.  There are virtually unlimi

This is the second article in my 3-part series about  How to Teach Reading . In this article I am focusing on how to tell if your child is ready to sit down and focus on explicit reading lessons. It is amazing to me that so many people want very young children to read. Yes, some very young children are ready to read very early, but... others are not! A lot of research has been done during the last five decades about how children learn to read, and we have learned A LOT of things. Sadly, this research has not translated into educational policy. One of the motivators for me in writing this series is to help parents and teachers understand how to teach reading better so there is less stress and more confident, relaxed parents and teachers.  Let's begin by looking at what we know about reading based on research that has been done: 1- Children are ready to read at different times. Most children are ready sometime between four and seven years old. 2- Reading skills

This is the first article in my 3-part series about How to Teach Reading . In this article I am focusing on ways to teach the pre-reading skills that preschoolers (3-6 year olds) need to learn before they can sit down and learn how to sound out words or focus on dedicated reading. I think it is important to point out that I focus on pre-reading skills with preschoolers. These are skills that are essential for reading and make learning to read easy. Once a child has mastered all of these skills, learning to actually read only takes a few weeks. But, learning these skills can take years. Like any skill important for a preschooler's life, these should be taught through play . Play is a young child's work, and they take it very seriously when they are having fun! You can click HERE to learn more about how a young child's brain works and how they learn best --the take-home message for this topic is that children learn pre-reading skills while they are playing. I