Teaching & Learning Moment - Learning Alphabets

~ Posted on Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 6:41 AM ~

I recently read about this from a book and decided to share this with you guys. 

Put it simply, it means if your kiddo is learning ABCs with this method, he/she is creating unnecessary extra steps to remember them. Extra step in this case means, in order to learn and remember the letter A, they have to visualise or see the picture of an apple just so they can remember the letter 'A' or 'a'. Sample shown below:

Learning Alphabets

What the article tried to say is to teach our kiddos directly like this:

Learning Alphabets

I remembered going through the phonics song lessons and Jolly Phonics (taught in our kiddo's preschool) with our 1st and although the songs made it fun for kiddos to remember the letter sounds, I personally think now that it is creating unnecessary steps to remember if a child is being taught to recognise alphabets with the additional visual aids.

Teaching kiddos how to sound out the letters phonetically by using the phonics songs are fine with me but I think for alphabet recognition, it will be better to teach the simpler and direct method, which is just plainly showing the letters in uppercase and lowercase. I'm going to try the direct methods with our girls and see how it turns out.

Learning Alphabets


Do share your thoughts on this!


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I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. Early December last year, I posted a similar scenario on my Facebook page (something I love to do to test parents and their kiddos)

For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here, you can click on the image to view the video on YouTube:

"As a parent, have you taught your children not to talk to strangers, to not go any where with someone they don’t know? Think they know better?

Joey Salads, a prankster with a YouTube channel that showcases dozens of his often hilarious antics, took a more serious tone in his latest video, which two days after being posted has more than 955,000 views.

Salads, who asked permission from parents before he approached their children, walked up to kids in a park with his white dog and showed just how easy it would have been to lure them off."

 

Do share your thoughts on this!

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.

 

Sharing - Lice Shouldn’t Keep Kids From School

~ Posted on Monday, May 4, 2015 at 5:59 AM ~

I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this.

For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:

"Head lice are annoying, but they don't actually make people sick, and children with the condition should not be kept away from school, according to new guidelines from a leading group of pediatricians.

The guidelines, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, say that although head lice can cause itching, they are not known to spread disease, and the insects are not very likely to spread from one child to another within a classroom. Rather, it is usually direct head-to-head contact that spreads lice.

For this reason, "no healthy child should be excluded from school or allowed to miss school time because of head lice or nits," the guidelines say. (Nits are the eggs of head lice.) Most doctors who care for children agree that school policies requiring children to be free from nits before returning to school should be abandoned, the AAP says.

In addition, screening kids at schools for head lice does not reduce the occurrence of the condition in classrooms over time, so routine screenings at schools should be discouraged, the AAP says. However, parents should still regularly check their children for head lice, and school nurses may check children who have symptoms of lice.

The new guidelines are an update to previous recommendations on head lice, issued in 2010."

 

I remembered back when I was in primary school (probably around 9-10 years old), I was sitting behind this girl with long hair and I was shocked at seeing lice crawling all over her hair. It still gives me the creeps whenever I think about it. But well, the girl is still attending classes then despite having lice on her head.

I personally feel that if a child has lice, the child must remained at home until all lice are gone. Spreading or not, just the thought of the lice crawling around on the hair is really really making me uncomfortable. As a parent, you wouldn't want your child to be infected with it, so why expose other children with lice right? I'm not sure how it goes with other countries' policies though, so would be interested to learn more on this.


Do share your thoughts on this!

** Note: I have disabled the commenting feature on my blog engine thanks to all the spammers who happily spam my blog every day. If you wish to ask me any questions, you can find me at my Facebook page (I'm there almost everyday) or just drop me an email if you wish to maintain some anonymity.