Love 2 Learn : Open House Handouts

• You should try to do some reading with your child on a regular basis. By now you know that as your child moves forward through the grades, his or her schedule becomes more active and self-initiated. You have probably find that it is not as easy as it once was to engage in daily reading together. At a minimum, though, try to spend some time on Sunday afternoons or evenings to read from authors such as Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Charlotte Bronte, Jack London, Langston Hughes, Virginia Sneve, Bret Harte, Alex Haley, or Louisa May Alcott, Edith Hamilton, C.S. Lewis, Sally Benson, or Paul Laurence Dunbar. Your child's interest in the stories you read will tell you a great deal about his or her development in listening and comprehension.

• Begin making a journal of good times together -- possibly the highlights of a trip, vacation, or family holiday. You and your child can each make entries. Read through what you have written from time to time.

• Read newspaper headlines together and try to figure out what the story is about. You might also make a point of reading aloud to each other one newspaper story every day. This will help make the newspaper important to your child, as well as provide reading practice. Moreover, it does not take a great deal of time.

• Get in the habit of clipping from the newspaper things you think your child might find interesting -- human interest stories, cartoons, news related to the local environment. Such pieces are natural starting points for conversation.

• Committing things to memory is a good exercise throughout the intermediate and middle school years. Each of you memorize a poem or story to tell to the other -- one in the fall and one in the spring. The presentations can be family events.

• Buy books for your child for special occasions. This is a way to tell your child that you value reading and ideas. It also gives you a chance to build later conversations around the books you have bought, by asking, "How was the book? What was the mystery?" and the like.

• As your child reads, find time to ask, "What is the book about? Who are the characters? What are they like? Where does the story take place?" Most children like to talk about what they are reading, as long as they do not perceive the questions to be either suspicious inquisitions or rote inquiries devoid of real interest.

• Take your child to the movies occasionally -- rather than just sending him or her to the movies. You will not only enjoy the outing together, but the event will give you a natural opportunity for conversation about the film's character, setting, theme, moral dilemmas, and so on.

• Each of you write an explanation of how to do something. For example, your child might decide to write a description of how to ride a bike while you will describe how to swim. Then see if your descriptions make sense to one another. Would your child's explanation help someone ride a bike for the first time?

Building Math Skills

Grade 5 Tips for Parents

• The more concrete the learning and the more children are encouraged to see mathematics in use all around them, the better. You can help by using math and the language of math around the house. Have your child help you with measuring tasks such as placing a picture on the wall, cutting out a pattern, building shelves, or papering a wall.

• Get your child to make estimates and judgments about distance and time, and play a lot of number-oriented games. Math is a natural area of learning that should always be interesting to children.

• Ask your child, "How might we go about estimating how fast an ant moves?"

• Together make a graph of the colors and makes of cars in a parking lot. Try it at several different times. Based on the data shown in your graphs, make a generalization about what you might find if you continued your observations at a later time.

• Play tic-tac-toe, dots, checkers, dominoes, concentration, hangman, Scrabble, chess, and increasingly complex card games such as hearts, rummy, and cribbage with your child. All involve problem solving and logic, and all are based on mathematics.

• With a map of the United States, ask, "What is the shortest route from Nutley, New Jersey, to Rochester, Minnesota?" Or have your child figure out how long it would take to get to the homes of relatives and friends around the country -- or the world -- by plane, train, automobile, or on foot.

• Ask, "How could we figure out how tall our house it? What about a tree, or a telephone pole?"

• Try out problems such as, "If you ran 40 yards in 12 seconds, how many feet did you cover per second?" Or "If you continued to run at the same speed, how long would it take you to run 70 yards? Or 240 yards? How about 800 yards?"

• Make up problems. For example: "It takes us 2 hours and 10 minutes to get to Aunt Maryann's house if we average 50 miles an hour. How long would it take if we went 35 miles an hour?"

• The calculator should be very familiar to your child. Using a calculator, pick a number such as 39, then take turns adding a number from 1 to 5 into the memory. The objective is to see who can get to 39 first. This is a good mental math task and also another way to use the calculator.

Building Science Skills

Grade 5 Tips for Parents

• When you see a living creature on a walk, on television, or in a book or movie, classify it as an amphibian, mammal, bird, reptile, fish, insect, or crustacean. If you are not sure of a particular creature's category, research it together in a directory, encyclopedia, or animal book.

• Observe the moon together over several weeks; note whether you are looking at it at the same time every day or at different times. (You and your child could do this exercise once a year for several years -- perhaps at a different season each year -- and learn something new each time.) Note the moon's location and draw its various shapes; be aware of the stars around it. Examine the moon chart in the weather section of your daily newspaper or on a calendar. There is almost no end to the astronomical observations you and your child can make. If, like many parents, you are not especially familiar with the sky, this exercise will be a good learning experience for you as well as for your child.

• Ask about the scientists your child is currently studying. Are men and women represented? What about people of color? What does your child know about these scientists and their work?

• Your child is learning about life in the oceans. See what your child can tell you about the following topics: whether there is more water or land on our planet; what kinds of plants and animals live in the different parts of the oceans; what we know about the ocean floor; marine fossils; and the potential for farming in the oceans.

• Your child is learning more about the human body. Ask, "What happens when your heart beats?" Your child should have some basic knowledge about the circulatory system.

• See whether your child can find his or her own pulse. How about your pulse? Have your child measure your heartbeats. Ask, "What would happen if I ran a mile and then you measured again?"

• What does your child know about the effects of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin?

• See what your child knows about the digestive system. Ask, "How does food change as we digest it?"

• Together think about the many ways the idea of time comes up in everyday life. Take turns pointing it out. You might say, "I have time on my hands," and your child might say, "Once upon a time." See how many you can get.

• Ask why it isn't the same time everywhere in the world. Why, when it is 12 noon in Boston, is it 11 am in Chicago?

Building Social Studies Skills

Grade 5 Tips for Parents

• Watch the television news together on occasion. Let the events on the news -- human interest stories, hurricanes, elections, and the peoples and circumstances of other countries -- become a basis for conversation. You might also watch documentaries about historical figures with your child; biography is a good basis for helping children learn about history. Such documentaries are becoming more common, especially on public television and certain cable networks. Documentary programs are also available on videocassette and can be checked out of libraries and rented from many video stores.

• Children in intermediate grades will notice and ask about the problems that they see around them: homelessness drugs, and conflict. It is good to talk about these issues. Ask your child whether he or she is discussing such topics in school. Does your child have unanswered questions?

• Look at photographs together. Family pictures showing you and your child at different ages are a good choice. Ask, "What can you remember about these earlier times? What is different now?" You will find that your child will not tire of looking at pictures of family members.

• Ask your child about how we know the actual shape of North America, South America, and the other countries. This is a way to see what your child understands about mapmaking, and it also offers an opportunity to discuss and examine maps and satellite photos of the earth.

• Using a map of the United States, discuss each region: its topography, its largest cities, its industries or economic activity, its population demographics, the historical events that happened there, and so on. You might start with a region where your family has lived in the past, or where a relative or friend lives, and then branch out into other regions.

• Have your child place various events into chronological order. Try the following events: the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Mayflower Compact, the establishment of Jamestown Colony by the British, the Norse exploration of North America, and the development of Native American societies.

• The era of European exploration -- roughly the 15th through 18th centuries -- fascinates children. You and your child can discuss many questions related to this era: Why were the European governments so interested in exploring the world? What was Columbus's purpose in sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean? What did people know about the world when Columbus set sail? Why has Columbus become so controversial?

• Children study the American colonies in considerable detail in the fifth grade. There are many ways to get your child to share what he or she is learning. You might inquire, "How much religious freedom did the Massachusetts Puritans allow? Why did they take the position they took on religious freedom? What were some of the differences between the colonies? Why did slavery take hold in the Americas? What have you learned about the Middle Passage?

The American Revolution is covered in fifth-grade social studies. See whether your child knows why some colonists were opposed to the revolution and remained loyal to Britain.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Open House Handouts