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    Please make sure your child practices these things several times a week.  The suggested ideas are merely suggestions.  How ever your child practices the skills is fine, but we DO need your child to continue practicing the skills:

    • Read the kindergarten sight words.  Ideas for practicing the words include: making flash cards, making a memory game, practing doing a "spelling test" of the words where someone gives the word for the child to spell or write, finding the words in books in the home or in online stories, etc.
    • Practice writing his/her first and last name correctly, using upper and lower case letters in the correct locations and appropriate sizing and spacing.
    • READ, READ, READ stories together.  Choose books from home and/or online books.  For online books, look under the "Websites for Learning" page in this webpage.  Epic Reading is a great online source for stories for kids.
    • Write a story about ANYTHING!  Have your child draw a picture, then label items in the picture or write about the picture.  Encourage your child to draw pictures with details and to use sounds to write words.  Don't expect your child to know how to correctly spell things at this time.  Encourage your child to write at least the beginning sound of words.  
    • Practice rhyming words.  Give your child three words, and have your child name the two words that rhyme.  Sing rhyming songs, and have your child identify the rhymes in the songs.  Read rhyming stories.
    • Have your child count to 100.  Depending on your child's current skills, work your way up to this point (or go higher if your child can already count to 100...If so, count by 2s, 5s, and 10s).  Start by counting to 20, then build up to 31, then up to 50, then up to 100.  Pay particular attention to make sure your child doesn't skip numbers when counting.  Very common numbers to skip when children are first learning are 13, 14, 15, and 29.  It may help your child to use a number grid, such as the one on this website to help.
    • Write the numerals in order from memory.  How high can you go?  Though reversals are normal at this age, we give gentle encouragement and guidance to help children learn the correct way of writing the numerals.
    • Practice reading numerals.  Write a numeral for your child, and ask him/her what it is.  All children need to identify numerals through at least 20; however, you can go as high as your child is able.  Many of our children can read numerals into the hundreds, and some into the thousands.
    • Provide basic addition and subtraction problems for your child to solve.  Use both words and numbers.  For example, you may say, "I ate 2 cookies, then I ate 1 more cookie.  How many cookies did I eat in all?"   Use the terms, "plus", "more than", "all together", "minus", "take away", "left", etc so your child becomes familiar with those terms and what they mean.  Children can use manipulatives or drawings to help them solve the math problems.  For exampe, they could draw circles to represent the cookies or they could use cheerios to solve the problems (first put out 2 cheerios, add 1 more, 2+1=3).  You could have the children use dice or dominos to write and solve addition problems.
    • Practice identifying the basic shapes: circle, square, rectangle, oval, rhombus ("diamond" for us old folks :-) ), trapezoid, and hexagon.  You can draw them for the child to identify, the child can draw them when you say the name, the child can find them in your house, the child can play online shape games, you can play a matching game where the child matches (+ SAYS) the shape, etc.

    Many of the online games listed under the "Websites for Learning" page in this website can help your child practice many of these skills.

    Let me know if you need any ideas for how to help your child practice any of the kindergarten skills!