January 22 - April 4
Now featuring an evening class! These year-round preschool classes develop and promote social skills, listening comprehension, and foundations of early literacy through letters, vocabulary, numbers, and sequencing. Classes are designed to encourage children’s love of reading via story, song, crafts, games, and sensory experiences. A registration form must be filled out for each child attending. This semester’s sessions will feature the following classes:
Sessions are open to children ages 10 months - 6 years. Caregiver attendance is required for children 2 years of age and under and is optional for children 3 - 6 years of age. Check out this fun rhyme we did in connection with our Kansas Reads to Preschoolers book Ten Pigs: an Epic Bath Adventure by Derek Anderson!
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Read and Learn classes are fun! We read stories that children get to participate in, sing songs (with lots of actions) that emphasize the main learning point of the stories, and do crafts and activities that also emphasize this main learning point.
Look what we did recently for our class on imagination--we read these fun stories, and then we made...thinking caps! Last fall we read and learned about numbers. Miss Christa's Little Learners class read the books in the image below--which the kids gave their kid-stamped approval to as "great stories"--and made an apple tree craft with 1 apple because they learned about the number 1. Then they said a goofy rhyme:
For more of Miss Christa's Little Learners fun, click here.
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Helping Children Prepare to Learn to Read
Our Read and Learn classes are built according to the state of Kansas's 6 by 6 Ready to Read: Six Skills by Six Years curriculum. The curriculum emphasizes 6 early literacy skills that you as parents and caregivers can use, too, to help children develop and prepare them to learn to read: ▪ Have Fun with Books—Help children think of books and reading as fun. Choose books your children will enjoy, use expression when you read aloud to them, and involve children in the reading. ▪ Notice Print All around You—Let children handle books and help you turn pages. Point to words on the page as you read to help children learn we read from left to right, top to bottom. ▪ Talk, Talk, Talk—Children with large vocabularies have a huge advantage in learning to read. Point to objects and name them. Name feelings too. When you encounter a new word, talk about its meaning. ▪ Tell Stories about Everything—Help children learn that all stories have a beginning, middle, and end by telling stories about your day. Choose books without words and encourage children to tell the stories from the pictures. When you read, ask questions such as, “What do you think will happen next?” ▪ Look for Letters Everywhere—Children need to learn shapes before they can learn letters. Play with shape puzzles and games. Introduce them to letter shapes by talking about letters in objects and words the children know. Help them learn that each letter has a name and that it represents different sounds. ▪ Take Time to Rhyme—Rhymes help children learn the sounds of words. Read Mother Goose rhymes with children. Sing with them. Play with words and help children sound them out. There are 3 developmental stages of children getting ready to read: ▪ Early Talkers (birth—2 years)—Early talkers are busy learning all about language by absorbing the different sounds they hear, and babbling and cooing in response. They are also learning about the world through their senses, which are sending millions of signals to their brains. Interactions with children at this stage are crucial because repeated experiences, activities, and sounds help early talkers’ brains start to make sense of things and to create learning and understanding. ▪ Talkers (2—3 years)—This is the stage children’s vocabulary begins to take off, so the more words they hear and learn the better. Research shows that children who are read to often have a larger vocabulary and better language skills by the time they enter kindergarten. Talkers are also at a stage when they can become an interactive part of the reading process. Asking them questions about a story, such as “How do you think this character feels?” or “What is happening?” helps them start to comprehend on their own. ▪ Pre-readers (4—5 years)—Learning to recognize that spoken language is made of separate and individual sounds is called phonological awareness. This skill is essential to learning to read. At this stage, children need lots of opportunities to play with rhymes and the sounds of words in order to be prepared to read when they get to school. The 6 by 6 Ready to Read curriculum was originally created by Johnson County Public Library. To learn more about the curriculum, visit their website: www.jocolibrary.org/birth-to-six |