Academic success for students is often a direct result of the partnership established between school and home. Listed below are some suggestions you may find helpful to help enrich your child’s reading development.

Foundational Literacy Skills
Letter recognition
• Using ABC cards, have your child put the cards in order. Then have them match lower case letters to capital letters.
• Taking only a few different letters (5-8), make multiple sets of cards and play Go Fish. Children will have to ask for a particular letter to make pairs.
Phonemic Awareness
• Say a short word. Then have your child stretch bubblegum, silly putty, or a rubber band as the two of you stretch the word by saying its sounds.
• Play word games in which you change one sound in a word to make a different word. Examples of sound changes: Change bat to mat. Now change mat to map.

Word Recognition
Phonics
• Help your child break unfamiliar long words into parts, sounding out each part and putting the parts together to say the word.
• Play Boggle Jr. to give your child practice with the letter-sound associations s/he is learning.

Fluency
• Use lively flashcard drills and games to help your child instantly recognize words, such as the, a, and be, that frequently appear in print. A list of these high-frequency words can be found at http://literacyconnections.com/
• Engage your child in reading short but interesting stories several times. For variation, have your child read along while you read the same passage or tape record his or her reading and then listen to the recording.

Vocabulary
• Read aloud stories, poems, and nonfiction material that your child will enjoy. Explain the meaning of the important words that are new to your child.
• Play word games such as Pictionary, Scrabble, and Boggle. Talk about words that may be unfamiliar to your child.

Comprehension
• Invite your child to retell a favorite story, movie, or family event. Ask questions to help your child focus on who was involved, where the action took place, and what happened. Also encourage your child to relate the story, movie, or event to other books s/he has read or experiences s/he has had.
• Talk about what you do when you’re reading and something doesn’t make sense to you. Maybe you reread, ask someone, or read on in hopes of getting more information. It’s important for children to know that good readers sometimes have difficulties, but they persist until they understand.

The word basic implies something is simple, straightforward, or easy. However, there is nothing easy about teaching the K-5 Mathematics Standard Course of Study. What many of us traditionally knew as math was taught by facts and rules, but today, getting the answer is no longer good enough. It is about attending explicitly to connections among facts, procedures, and ideas and encouraging students to wrestle with the important ideas in an intentional and conscious way.

Nothing is simple anymore – as we are in the Information Age where information is doubling every five years and encyclopedias are being updated with Wikipedia. More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous five thousand years. What does that mean for our children in mathematics education? We must produce mathematically powerful thinkers who not only can “memorize,” but analyze and comprehend how it works. And once they analyze and comprehend, they must also be able to communicate their thinking.

If you would like to examine the breadth and depth of your child’s mathematics curriculum, please visit: http://community.learnnc.org/dpi/math and click on Instructional Resources, followed by the appropriate grade level. For further help with terminology, click on Glossary of Mathematical Terms for Parents and Teachers in English and Spanish.

Common Misperceptions about Mathematics: (National Research Council)
1. Math is about learning to compute.
Many of us in the U.S. had math instruction that focused primarily on computation, with little emphasis on understanding. If one believes that math is primarily about computation, then sense making may never take place.
2. Mathematics is about “following rules” to guarantee correct answers.
If mathematic procedures are understood as inventions designed to make common problems more easily solvable and to facilitate communication involving quantity, those procedures take on new meaning. Different procedures can be compared for their advantages and disadvantages.
3. Some people have the ability to “do math” and some don’t.
This is a serious preconception in the U.S. but not in other countries where the idea is that learning depends on the “energy expended” rather than the ability. That accounts for a significant difference in performance.

Helen Keller once said, “There is one thing worse than not being able to see, being able to see and having no vision.” We in Wake County have a vision that all students can become mathematically powerful thinkers and will be prepared for a future where they will have to compete in a global economy, which will be dominated by those who can think of the next new invention or technology or equation.

Extending Mathematical Thinking
Here are some suggestions of how you can work with your child to extend mathematical thinking:

• Look for numbers wherever you can find them. Have your child practice reading them to you. Cut numbers out of the newspaper and put them in numerical order. Take a number and see whether your child can find the place value of each digit.
• Read counting books.
• Count objects, change by pennies, nickels and dimes.
• Play board games where children advance spaces on a board.
• Play dominoes and “war” with dominoes or cards.
• Use beans or counters when children are beginning to add and subtract.
• Get a ruler and measure everything in centimeters and inches. Use a meter stick to measure in meters and feet. Find reasons to measure and have your child do it for you.
• Play spatial visualization games with pattern block pieces or puzzles.
• Find the perimeter in every room in your house. Make a diagram of a room and measure the furniture. See how many different places your couch or bed will fit.
• Work on an allowance budget. Have your child keep track of money spent and look at what happens to the money.
• Play addition, subtraction, multiplication and division games. (There are many good ones out there.)
• Go bargain shopping and compare prices. See if you can find the best deal.
• Figure mileage every time you get in the car.
• Have your child teach you about what they learned at school in Math. Those who can teach a subject are going to remember 90% of what they have taught.