School Sparks - Kindergarten Readiness

Children can observe their surroundings in many ways. They can take a quick glance, they can look for obvious visual cues, or they can look carefully at the details. While every situation does not call for careful scrutiny, it is important that children are able to notice small details in visual messages. This ability is called visual discrimination and is essential for success in every academic area.

Children begin to read by learning to identify letters and the sounds those letters make. If you have followed some of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I suggest introducing the letters in a particular order - namely, introducing the majority of consonant letters first and then introducing the five vowels.

The winter months are ideal for working on auditory processing skills with your little one. Being “housebound” due to inclement weather can get a little boring by the time February rolls around, so let’s add some fun to those dreary winter days and help your child beef up his listening skills.

In response to my blog post last week about what I consider to be the perfect holiday present for young kids, I received lots of wonderful emails asking about what other educational holiday gifts I would recommend for youngsters. So this blog post will be devoted to another gift that I consider perfect for young children and amazingly cost-conscious for parents: A bag of coins!

A few weeks ago I noticed an interesting flurry of purchases of the School Sparks workbook. And by flurry, I mean sets of 3, 4, 5 and even 10 workbooks being purchased at a time by a single person. Typically when someone orders 2 or 3 workbooks, I just assumed they had multiple children and wanted each child to have his or her own workbook. But a family with 10 kids?

Worksheets added this week: Uppercase/lowercase letters in different fonts matching game. Plus, extra tips and activity suggestions for using this fun matching letters game to help children hone important skills.

Worksheets added this week: Uppercase/lowercase letters matching game. Plus, extra tips and activity suggestions for using this fun matching letters game to help children hone important skills.

Worksheets added this week: Halloween math worksheets. Plus, extra tips and activity suggestions for helping your child have a fun and educational Halloween with math.

Worksheets added this week: Halloween worksheets. Plus, extra tips and activity suggestions for helping your child have a fun and educational Halloween.

Worksheets added this week: Uppercase and lowercase letters worksheets. Plus, extra tips and activity suggestions for helping children get comfortable identifying the uppercase and lowercase version of each letter.