Child Development Reads

I have been greatly influenced by writings of the ages and stages of children by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg through the Gesell Institute of Child Development.  If you are going to be teaching 5-and 6-year olds, you should read Your Four Year Old, Your Five Year Old and Your Six Year Old.
Understanding the general growing up characteristics of each age will help you be able to provide appropriate learning opportunities and activities.

Did you notice my Four and Five-year old books are not in the picture?

Someone has borrowed them again.

STANDING ON MY SOAPBOX
For the past 20 years, I explain I am now teaching Kinderst Grade.(I made up that term.)   We are teaching "kindergarten age" (5 and 6 year old) children AND expecting them to learn academics that used to be taught in First Grade.  Yes, children can surprise you and can do so much but not YET truly know it because they need time to MATURE their understanding.
For example number conservation is concrete by third grade.  So our activities used to be a lot of repetition of counting, ordering, writing, ways to combine sets to TEN.  Now the push is for kindergarten to read, write and use numbers to 100.  Most are successful but many are still counting to reassure the quantity of sets. They have not yet been able to see the cluster.  This skill is developed by grouping, counting, sorting sets to 10 over and over. The more hands-on activities we can do will help.

HANDS-ON learning
I will admit that I have succumbed to doing more paper pencil work than I believe in.  I hope that with this blog, I will do as I say more and concentrate through my actions and words how children learn best.  BEST PRACTICE is a term used most recently in education to describe how to teach children.  So my goal is to concentrate on the BEST PRACTICE in kindergarten.  I am not a researcher but I know what I've experienced.
Let's learn some more....