Improving Focus

One struggle for us, especially with our son, is to get him to focus.  I came across some games that can played offline to help children.  I am including this in this blog, since focus is necessary for any educational activity.   Here are some games that make sense, and would be fun for most kids:

Have your child close his eyes, and imagine a triangle. Then have him draw the triangle, with his eyes closed, on a piece of paper, slowly, and accurately. Then have him do it again, and watch if there is any improvement in the triangle he has drawn. The slower he does it, the better. It is practically impossible to perform this task, without concentrating and focusing on it, and the slower the task is performed, the longer the intense focus. If you want, you can have a competition, you can do it with your child, and the one who finished later is the winner, or the one who has a better triangle, wins. You can organize a group of kids to compete with each other. (When your child is drawing perfect triangles, you can advance to more complicated figures, a square, a Star of David, a star... whatever figure you can think of.)

Reference: http://www.freeconsumerindex.com/Parenting/19460.php

FossWeb

This is a website that is recommended by my son's first grade teacher.  It conveys science concepts.  I checked out some of the interactive activities in the K-2 section.  The "build your rollercoaster" game seemed interesting. 

Saxon Math

Although the title of the blog is "Web" teaching resources, I would like to mention a non-Web resource that we have been using for first grade Math. The two popular private schools in the bay area are Challenger and Stratford, and both use the Saxon system of Math in their curriculum. My son attended KG at Stratford after which we moved him into a public school. Since he and we really liked the Saxon Math, we purchased the next level of that series from Amazon. Pros of this system - Very gentle, gradual progression through various Math concepts - addition, subtraction, estimation, time, etc. Unlike Kumon, each worksheet has a variety of activities, and this seems to work better with our son.   When new concepts are introduced, the child will need some help initially, but the burden on the parent/teacher is not much because of the slow and steady pace. 

Internet4Classrooms

As I googled my way through the Web looking for resources to teach my daughter to read small words, I came across Internet4Classrooms.

It is a very rich site - lots of links. I focused on those links that would potentially help my children - Links for PreK-12 - Elementary Subjects - Language Arts - 1st Grade Language Arts Skills Practice

- First Grade Skillbuilders Language Arts - Language - Parts of Speech - All about Adjectives. This lead me to some kind of interactive presentation that a teacher would use in the class to teach students about adjectives. A parent could use this too. I am skeptical about being able to hold the attention of my six year old with this. I will try later today, and report the results.

In general, very rich site - lots and lots of links. I plan to explore this site in depth to identify parts that would benefit my kids.

Beestar

We were referred to http://www.beestar.org/by a friend. Turns out to be quite a treasure trove. They have Math and Reading worksheets for K-8. We signed up for the free version that allows one access to 2 worksheets per week. The first grade Math worksheets are not easy, to put it mildly. They cover a variety of concepts such as "read clock, place value, simple patterns, problem solving methods, describe individual coins, understand real object graphs, skip count, unit sense, apply simple addition facts, addition/subtraction patterns, compare small numbers, etc". This is a huge improvement over say, Kumon, worksheets that tend to be very uni-dimensional.

Again, this is not a site that teaches concepts but tests concepts. They do provide a list of reference books that could be used offline.

I am still on the quest for finding sites that not just test but also teach in a fun way. Of course, it would be nice if those sites were free and great at capturing the imagination of young children. :)

Youtube!

We have been trying in vain to get our 3.5 year old to learn some phonics. She knows her letters and sounds, and we now want to see if she is ready to read small words. So, we spell words out to her such as "C-A-T is cat", and then ask her "So, M-A-T is m-m-m-m...." Her response is usually "I am tired". Considering that she is completely and absolutely addicted to TV, I went onto Youtube (she associates Youtube with entertainment) and did a search on "phonics". I found a series of short videos that teach words with nice pictures. I did not think they were particularly exciting, but my 3.5 year old was transfixed. Here is the link to the first in the series. We were able to make it through the first three in a row. Quite impressive! However, the only con is that there is no structure, and no repetition. The series quickly moves through a bunch of unrelated words (phonetically). So, I am not sure about its effectiveness.

Teaching kids to type

I volunteer in my first grader's computer lab every week. Turns out that kids are taught science and math on computers starting from Kindergarten. I observed that kids that know the keyboard well literally fly through the labs, while the rest are searching for keys. One of my friends told me about this online typing tutor. It is hosted on BBC's site - http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

My six year old whose attention span is not great is able to work on this for half an hour at a time. It has helped his typing skills as well. I notice that he now automtaically puts two hands on the keyboard. I am sure the speed with follow.

If you like Kumon...

If you like the Kumon system, you can save some money by using sites that provide free Math worksheets. An example - http://www.freemathworksheets.net/general-math.php

A site that is more comprehensive -  covers Math and Language Arts - http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/index.html

Pro - This is an easy way to save the 100$ a month one would pay to a Kumon franchise for their worksheets. Con - Children are not accountable to any third parties, and this may lead to them slacking off. One more con is that at Kumon, they test the kid once in a while to see if he/she is ready for the next level. In the case of using free worksheets, parents would have to make that call, and decide what the next level should be. Again, just like in the case of Miss Maggie, these worksheets are good once the concepts have been taught, and only speed has to be developed.

Miss Maggie Around the World in 80 Seconds

http://www.missmaggie.org/scholastic/roundtheworld_eng_launcher.html

Great site for building speed in mental math. When we discontinued our son from Kumon, we experimented with this site. Worked very well. Our hyperative son loved being able to jump around the room shouting out answers to questions, and seeing how many seconds it took him to finish a round of addition and subtraction questions. We started with this when he was 5. The "game" has two settings - "easy" and "hard". Pros - Fun for children because it takes less time than filling out worksheets. Cons - Great for testing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, and not suitable for teaching and learning those concepts. Most importantly, helps build speed after the concepts have been learned.

Starfall

Now, here is a site I love - http://www.starfall.com

My daughter learned her letters and sounds from this site. The most useful part is the screen where it displays the letters. Click on them, and hear the sound they make with examples of words that begin with the letters. My daughter has been through these many times. The rest of the site has introductions to other phonics concepts. We are yet to see the effectiveness of those. Will post updates as we see progress.

Our Experiment with Kumon

When our son was 4, the preschool teacher told us that he was unable to finish any task because he was prone to daydreaming. We tried working with him at home, and just could not figure out how to get him to focus on anything. The only thing he could focus on was TV. A friend told us about Kumon, and we enrolled in the program. It involved taking our son to the center twice a week where he would finish a couple of worksheets. His work would be timed, and progress monitored to see him improve over time. The rest of the week, we would work with him on worksheets provided by the center. We did this for about a year. The pros - our son learned to read. Very quickly he progressed from learning letters and sounds to reading small books. But, the Math was a struggle. He would sit with his worksheet filled with questions such as 2 + 1 = ? 4 + 2 = ? with his head in his hand, eyes staring at the sky dreaming away to glory. Working with him at home just lead to more resistance. Finally, after much frustation on his part and ours, we just gave up.

A little about myself

I am a faculty member at San Jose State University's College of Business. I have been teaching for more than 15 years now - I taught my way through grad school, and except for a brief three year stint with a start up in the Silicon Valley, teaching has been my life. But, teaching little children has been a different ball game altogether. Some of the challenges - a) they are your own kids (so, emotion can play a greater role, b) tendency to imagine the worst (just try typing "kid won't pay attention" into Google, and you will be inundated with results about ADD, ADHD, Aspergers Syndrome and Autism). Given that it is always useful to be aware of all possibilities, it can still be very unnerving for a new parent with not much of a comforting social network of aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents who have for the most part seen it all, and c) difference in attitudes towards parenting by mom and dad.

Ok...I see I am digressing already. Let me start summarizing what we've tried, what worked, and what did not.

Motivation for this Blog

As working parents of two young kids (a six year old boy and three year old girl), I am always looking for ways to teach my kids effectively within our limited time and resources.

The purpose of this blog is to describe our experiments and experiences. I am hoping this will help others in their hunt for resources, and will also lead to us pooling together our ideas.