Show Love, Develop Fine Motor Skills

Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity for both parents and childcare providers to engage children in activities that will improve their fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are the coordination of small muscle movements which occur e.g., in the fingers, usually in coordination with the eyes. These skills are vital to our everyday life and impact our ability to do all sorts of things ranging from being able to pick up small items, being able to button a shirt to drawing and writing in the classroom. However, these skills are not innate to humans and need to be developed over time and craft projects are an excellent way to do so.

Drawing and Tracing: If your program will be celebrating Valentines’ Day try creating “mailboxes” for each child made of cardstock, brown paper bags, or recycled boxes. Have the children decorate their mailbox with crayons, colored pencils, markers, or even paint. Provide stencils for them to trace hearts, flowers or other shapes onto the mailbox.

Using tools:  Have children make their own Valentines to give away with colorful construction paper and safety scissors. Encourage the children to decorate their Valentines with glitter, stickers, stamps or paint.  This would be a great opportunity for children to practice picking up and manipulating small objects.

The basic arts and crafts of Valentine’s Day offer great fine motor skills practice to children and a lot of fun at the same time! While they create their tokens of affection, you can show your care by encouraging them to develop the skills they need for the rest of their lives.

Celebrating the Vietnamese New Year in Fields Corner

Fields Corner Children Thrive celebrated the start of the Year of the Dragon on Saturday, January 21st.

Over 60 Vietnamese families with young children with Autism joined Mayor Thomas M. Menino at Dorchester House Multi-Service Center for games, arts and crafts, a traditional Dragon Dance, and the chance to receive “lixi”, a small gift of money meant to bring good luck in the new year.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Fields Corner Children Thrive sponsors a monthly support group for Vietnamese families with children with Autism.  For more information, contact Marika Michelangelo at Dorchester House.

Photos courtesy of Oriole Bui.

Wordless Books and Reading

Here at ReadBoston, we’re strong advocates for reading aloud to children. In fact, research says that, “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”  In order to develop a love of reading, children need to hear stories, many stories, read aloud.  And, hearing books read aloud is fun, exciting and helps children connect with the magic and wonder of stories.

One way we love to read to babies, toddlers and young children is to use wordless books. We recently created a list of our favorite wordless books that adults and children can look at together to create their own stories to go along with the illustrations. Wordless picture books are a wonderful way to introduce young children to concepts they will later apply when learning to read, such as building vocabulary, comprehension skills and sequencing of events in a story.  Wordless books are also great for English language learners and adults whose first language is not English- families can “read” wordless picture books as a way of creatively sharing stories together.

Click here for a list of some of our favorite wordless picture books.

We’re on Facebook – become a fan today! http://www.facebook.com/readboston 

We’re on Twitter! @ReadBostonMA

Read, Read, Read!

At Jumpstart, we are constantly asking ourselves an important question: what more can we do for our preschoolers?  While visiting some Jumpstart sessions this week, I saw some fantastic reading strategies, language and literacy activities, and conversations around choice-time courtesy of Boston’s Community Corps (our older adult corps of volunteers).  But we all agreed that there is more we can do to make our four hours per week with these kids even more meaningful.

Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about our Reading Center.  The Reading Center is an option for kids to choose during choice-time, but is all too often never chosen at all.  We know how important early reading skills are, and know that we need to take every opportunity that we can to expose children to reading.  In thinking about what more we could do to sell our kids on the Reading Center, I came across some great ideas and resources, including some creative Reading Center set-ups from one of our very own Jumpstart Sites!

• Jumpstart at Emerson College came up with these thoughtful and creative set-ups for their Reading Center:

By thinking creatively about their set-up, Jumpstart at Emerson College has made the Reading Center exciting and engaging so their kids will be more likely to make the choice to read with their Jumpstart friends.  Ideas like this make reading more of an experience than just reading words on a page–it becomes and engaging activity that kids can get excited about.

• Reading Rockets also has pages and pages of tips and tricks for parents, teachers and even school administrators.  One of my favorite parent resources was “10 Things You Can Do to Raise a Reader–” this is a great list of quick, easy, every-day activities and reminders for how parents can get their kids off on the right foot when it comes to reading.  I also loved the “Themed Booklists” and the how-to on setting up a “Classroom Library,” because they reminded me of a lot of the things we are constantly thinking about at Jumpstart, and prove that there is a lot more that can go into teaching a child how to read then just handing him a book.

Do you know of any more great reading resources?  Share them here so we can come up with even more ideas to get our children invested in reading!

COMING SOON: STEM Resources for Preschool Teachers

How often have you heard preschool teachers talking about their STEM activities or the STEM skills in their curriculum? Probably not very often but preschool teachers are engaging children in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math activities every day. They don’t refer to their activities as STEM activities but they are. A common misconception is that STEM activities are for older kids. What does STEM look like for preschoolers? The STEM Sprouts Teaching Guide will show you! Through a project funded by National Grid, Boston Children’s Museum has created the STEM Sprouts Teaching Guide, soon to be available on the Museum’s website http://www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/.

This is what you’ll find in the guide:

• What is STEM is all about?
• Brain Building 101
• Asking Good Questions:  Focus on “What”
• A Day in the Life of a Preschooler
• Massachusetts Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences
• STEM Activities for Preschoolers

In addition there will be eight downloadable tip sheets on Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Seeing, Touching, Hearing, and Smelling/Tasting each with the following information:
• How can so much fun teach STEM skills?
• Activities to try
• What to tell children
• What to tell parents
• The brain-building connection
• Books to learn more

For more information about the guide, contact Beth Fredericks: fredericks@bostonchildrensmuseum.org