Reading aloud and sharing stories with your child is a great way to spend time together. Reading and storytelling also help promote language, literacy and brain development. Research also proves that children who enjoy reading do better at school in all subjects. Sharing stories, talking and singing every day helps your child’s overall development in a number of ways. Reading and sharing stories can:
Just by looking at books with your child, you can be a great storyteller and a good model for using language and books. Your child will learn by watching you hold a book the right way and seeing how you move through the book by gently turning the pages. Reading stories with children has benefits for grown-ups too. The special time you spend reading together promotes bonding and helps to build your relationship. This is important for your child’s developing social and communication skills.
At Ekya Schools we inculcate the habit of reading right from the Early Years, in Kindergarten and Montessori. There is a lot of focus on reading in the library, at the storytelling sessions and puppetry classes. For primary, middle and senior school, there is a designated reading week during which there are activities like Book Reviews, D-E-A-R (Drop Everything and Read) and Mystery Readers being conducted annually. The English Language Program at Ekya also offers a wide range of texts from all genres to further the interests of the students and encourage them to delve deeper into the richness of the language.
As a parent, there is no more important activity for preparing your child to succeed as a reader than reading aloud together. Fill your story times with a variety of books. Be consistent, be patient, and watch the magic work. We have compiled a set of reading tips that can help parents of
Infants
Toddlers
Kindergarteners
First Graders
Take a look and happy reading!
It’s never too early to read to your little one. As soon as your child is born, he or she starts learning. Just by talking to, playing with, and caring for your child every day, you help your tiny tot develop language skills necessary to become a reader. By reading with your little one, you foster a love of books and reading right from the start. At Ekya, we have compiled five reading tips that offer some fun ways you can help your little one become a happy and confident reader.
Start young and stay with it
Snuggle up with a book: When you hold your child close and look at a book together, your little one will enjoy the snuggling and hearing your voice as well as the story. Feeling safe and secure with you while looking at a book builds your child's confidence and love of reading.
Choose child-friendly books: Books with bright and bold or high-contrast illustrations are easier for young children to see, and will grab their attention. Books made of cloth or soft plastic (for the bathtub) or "board books" with sturdy cardboard pages are easier for them to handle.
Keep books where your little one can reach them: Make sure books are as easy to reach, hold, and look at as toys. Remember, a young child will do with a book what he/she does with everything else — put it in his/her mouth. And that's exactly what they are supposed to do, so you may only want to put chewable books within reach.
Develop a daily routine: Routines can soothe a child and let them learn to predict what will happen next. The ability to predict is important when your child is older and is reading independently.
Sing, Read, Repeat: Read favourite stories and sing favourite songs over and over again. Repeated fun with books will strengthen language development and positive feelings about reading.
The sequence of topics in Singapore Math has been carefully constructed based upon child development theory. The beauty of this approach is that the majority of students are well prepared to tackle increasingly difficult topics, such as fractions and ratio, when they are introduced in the third through fifth grades. Those students are also then typically ready for algebra and geometry in middle school.Visualize the Problem Singapore Math relies heavily on visualization, which is often neglected in the conventional teaching of the subject. “If I’m going to teach about multiplication I will bring out physical objects and demonstrate how to multiply, and then move to the abstraction of lining up numbers in a multiplication equation. Singapore Math, on the other hand, introduces a middle step between the concrete and abstract called the pictorial approach. It asks students and teachers to draw a diagram of the concepts involved.” Students also learn to use model drawing to solve worded problems - instead of trying to picture the problem in their heads, then writing out the equation to solve it, students in Singapore Math diagram the elements of the word problem. Solid Foundation Building In the traditional approach of teaching, one where a topic is revisited in the course of months or years, or later grades and is taxing for both students and teachers. Singapore Math aims to eliminate this task by building a strong foundation for the learning of the said topic. Students in the same classroom may learn the concepts at different paces, but ultimately they all learn them and help develop their own solid foundation for further math learning. This prevents the need for reteaching as students move to the next grade. How Singapore Math fits the Ekya curriculum At Ekya, we deploy the Singapore Math methodology from K1 to Grade V. We've listed out a few examples below: As part of their group activity, students of Grade I use ice-cream sticks or raw pasta to put equal amounts in each of the circle. This enables them to understand the concept of multiplication. In a hands-on activity, students of Grade II learn that a balance is a useful tool in comparing the masses of objects Our Grade III students learn to measure the capacity of containers of various sizes through personal experimentation. Students of Grade IV explore the concepts of fractions through visual representations Bar model is explicitly taught beginning in Grade II and extending all the way to secondary algebra. It is a method of representing word problems and number relationships. Students are taught to use rectangular bars to represent the relationship between known and unknown numerical quantities and to solve problems related to these quantities. Students of Grade IV use the four mathematical operations and solve the problems in the Decimals chapter using the bar model. Opening up to the idea of Singapore Math While parents would love to sit their kids through learning tables, they might naturally resist the route taken by Singapore Math, especially after they remember how they tackled a concept like fractions or geometry.
Looking back at how we learnt our Math, importance and marks were both rewarded only for getting the correct answer. With Singapore Math, we’re looking to understand each step in the process of getting the answer- our students should be able to explain how they have arrived at their final step. That’s a big thing that parents need to understand. We may want our children to get the right answer, but we also want them to know why it is the right answer.For our readers who are interested in finer details of the techniques used in this methodology, click here for a quick guide.
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