Sometimes, as I showed my 4-year-old students some new materials to work with (which teachers call manipulatives), they would ask me, "What does it DO?" This question would make me think twice about what people give children to play with: Too often it's toys and manipulatives that are designed to...

Water fascinates young children. Whether the water is in small or large quantities, however, it is always important to think about safety when water is involved and to ensure that young children are properly supervised. With this in mind, let's talk about water play.

A small bin full of water...

An invaluable survival strategy for parents and teachers of young children is the establishment of daily and weekly routines.

To help your child learn and remember the daily routines that occur between waking up and bedtime, you can use pictures that you cut out, draw, or take with a...

Open a book with your child and step into another world!

When we provide children the gift of books and language, we are providing them with imaginative experiences that are important in building a nation of creative thinkers and innovators.

Early experiences with quality children's literature help to build...

The holidays offer wonderful opportunities to create learning experiences for children that center around cooking. These experiences are especially powerful because they involve all of the senses: smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and seeing -- which is one reason that memories created in the kitchen can last a lifetime! With a...

Every child's education should be well balanced, including the fundamentals of reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts. Often when there are budget cuts in schools, the first thing to be eliminated is the arts. The problem with this is that in addition to their inherent value, the...

As a teacher of young children for more than 30 years, one of the things that I valued most was children's drawings. What incredible imagination and creativity young children have!

At the beginning of each school year, I would go to the board and create for the children hand-drawn pictures...

When your child reads, he or she looks at the written words on a page and decides what spoken words the written words represent. But that doesn't help him understand what he is reading unless he also knows the meanings of those spoken words.

In fact, research has demonstrated that...