“Play and Talk” are the key to academic success.

“Play is the key to academic success” http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/simon-says-dont-use-flashcards/ 

Parents who want to stimulate their children’s brain development often focus on things like early reading, flashcards and language tapes. But a growing body of research suggests that playing certain kinds of childhood games may be the best way to increase a child’s ability to do well in school.” Play is one of the most cognitively stimulating things a child can do,” says Megan McClelland, an early-childhood-development researcher.

Language acquisition and fluency comes from face to face interaction between an adult and a child, not from a gadget or a flash card. Face to face interaction is how children play with language and play is one of the most cognitively stimulating things a child can do.  Children's brains grow at a dazzling pace in the first years of life. Most of a baby’s 100 billion brain cells aren’t yet connected in networks. Those cells become connected when babies have stimulating experiences: reading singing, talking, and playing. 

Research from the US Department of Education shows that early language experience actually stimulate a child’s brain to grow. Young children and infants need to be surrounded by people talking and talking a lot. Talking develops a child’s use and understanding of language, which is the basis of reading. Vocabulary development by age 3 has been found to predict reading success. 

Clear connections between reading aloud & success in reading

Long before we focus on children and reading, we need to make sure children have the rich vocabularies they need to get ready to learn to read There are clear connections between reading aloud and success in reading. Learning to read is incremental. Children need to be familiar with letters, words, & sounds
Reading success is based on three concepts:
1. Knowing the letters and sounds of the alphabet.
2. Understanding print concepts: letters make up words and words have meaning.
3. Words are made up of sound chunks that can be identified.
These skills are developed when we regularly read aloud. 
Reading and talking about colors, numbers, letters, & pictures are a natural and easy way for children to learn language. Vocabulary development by age 3 has been found to predict reading success. For toddlers, using a book to point and identify words is how we help a child learn to name the world. It is an enormous cognitive development. 

One is a Snail Ten is a Crab by April Pulley Sayre is an enormously fun and amusing counting book. You can’t help but be entertained and charmed by this clever counting book.

Start the school year with a Growth Mindset

Mid August comes and a new school year beckons. A growth mindset not only teaches children to love to learn but also determines the quality of their learning. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for children to be successful learners. Put these beliefs in place and nurture a growth mindset.

• Most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.
• Intelligence is not a static state. Intelligence is something you acquire and can be developed.
• Being mastery oriented is about having the right mindset, which encourages learning and is not about proving how smart you are.
• Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control.
• To be effective, praise needs to be specific. Learn to say, “I like how you keep trying.”
• Stress capability rather than a general feeling of self-worth.

New twist on bonuses for teachers.

New twist on bonuses for teachers: Give the money at the start of the school year—but yank it back if students underperform.

In nine kindergarten-through eighth-grade schools in Chicago Heights, Ill., 150 teachers took part in the experiment. Some teachers got $4,000 in a lump sum at the start of the school year, but they were told they’d lose some or all of the money if their students didn’t improve sufficiently. Others were simply offered a traditional bonus, also $4,000 payable at year’s end.

The standard bonuses had little to no effect, but students taught by teachers who got the advance bonus improved their relative standing on a math best by 6.8 to 9.6 percentile points—an effect similar to that of cutting class size by a third.

Findings from: “Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives Through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment”