Kids Korner – Greenwood Public Library Blogs

Cooking with Kids

Posted on August 24, 2020 by GPL

My kids have always been interested in cooking. My oldest daughter loves baking. During the stay at home order, my kids and husband would have cooking competitions. I’ll be honest, they weren’t exactly competitions. They just wanted an excuse to make some crazy concoctions. They were very creative and most of what they made was edible.

Check out these cookbooks from our collection to explore cooking with your own kids. I wish my family had these books at home during the stay at home order.

Mug It!

While we were home, we did check out Mug It! on hoopla. We made mac & cheese and chocolate chip cookies during the quarantine.

Cool Sugar-Free Recipes

I’m always looking for healthy foods that my kids will actually eat. This book has clear instructions for the recipes and great pictures. The Chocolate Fudge and Flavorful Bread recipes look tasty. I have said that every tooth in my girls’ mouths is a “sweet tooth.” They LOVE their sweet treats.

Super Simple Lunches

“Super Simple” is right! There are nine delicious no bake recipes. This book includes cooking basics, measuring tips, cooking terms, a picture dictionary of tools, and an ingredients list. The Ham and Cheese Pinwheel recipe has ingredients that can be adjusted to fit everybody.

The Math Chef

While this book doesn’t have fancy pictures, it has many math activities to make learning fun. What better way to explain volume, fractions, and area than with food. The Superquick Stromboli Slices recipe meets the Boones competition standards. This one calls for frozen dough, but the Boone kids love making their own dough. This is another recipe that is easily customizable for each member of the family.

Back to School Resources

Posted on August 19, 2020 by GPL

Each year during the “back to school” season I face a range of bittersweet emotions. I’m always excited to see what new things my child will learn and how he will grow. Juggling childcare suddenly becomes easier. On the other hand, I am sad to lose out on our extra time at home together and anxious over how he’ll adjust to a new classroom.

This year, my emotions are even more difficult to sift through as I can’t even predict where learning will take place this year. The decisions to provide in-person instruction or e-learning are difficult for schools and parents alike. However, when you factor in the extra support and planning needed for children with IEPs or 504s the stress of these decisions amplifies. Lately I’ve heard more and more worries from friends to my Facebook page about how children’s needs will be met among the pandemic. How can a child who requires a one-on-one aide receive that level of support while e-learning, especially with working parents? For students learning in school, especially those who may be immune-compromised, are masks and social distancing enough? Can we meet the social-emotional needs of our kids in a world of social distancing or e-learning? I don’t have the answers yet, and I am sure that by the first day of school I’ll have even more questions. What I do have are resources from the library and community to help me navigate parenting in the age of COVID, from balancing health and safety issues to special education rights.

Among the Parent/Teacher collection in the Children’s Department are books on special education from Wrightslaw, resources for diagnoses from dyscalculia to dyslexia, and more. In addition to our physical collection, GPL’s Children’s Disability & Mental Health Resources website is full of information and links to organizations that can provide help and guidance. There is even a section specific to COVID-19 resources. GPL also has a variety of resources that can help supplement your child’s learning, whether it is at school, e-learning, or homeschool. These include our “Basics” picture book collection covering the ABCs, numbers, shapes, and colors, Beginning Readers, Read-Along books that include CDs, as well as a robust Fiction and Nonfiction collection. Beyond books, our kits can also help supplement learning from Beginning Reading to STEAM. And of course, GPL is still offering curbside pickup and digital resources. While we don’t know what challenges we will face during this school year, GPL is here to help!

Home Education

Posted on August 12, 2020 by GPL

Many parents are embarking on educating their children at home due to the COVID-19 situation. GPL has put together a list of resources to help you in this new endeavor – GPL Homeschool Page. There are a plethora of choices available. Whether you are choosing virtual options, online options, hybrid programs, or completely going off the grid to make your own programs, we have resources to direct you to for help.

Both my coworker Bonnie and I have educated our children until college with an assortment of programs and materials. I used a combination of curriculum including systematic phonics programs, Saxon math, and unit studies-based curriculum. My children were involved in 4-H (public speaking, aeronautics, sewing, nutrition, animal husbandry, etc), Bible Bowl, various soccer and running competitions, Civil Air Patrol, piano, youth groups, and many volunteer experiences. In high school they participated in coop classes and took dual credit college classes for science and foreign language. All my children received numerous scholarships and obtained degrees from Ashland University in Ohio, Notre Dame, Hanover, and Purdue. It was not an easy road but we made it.

Bonnie based her home school curriculum on the recommendations of The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Her children attended the education coop classes offered by SEEK and SCHA (Southside Christian Homeschool Academy). Several of these high school classes are AP (Advanced Placement). They took dual credit classes at Franklin College (Running Start Program) and were involved in numerous performances through CGFAA and AGAPE youth community theater programs. They were also in church youth groups, local volunteer services projects, received classical training in voice and piano and were pages in our GPL Children’s Dept. Her daughters received scholarships to Ohio State University and IU. Bonnie’s youngest was named as a National Merit Scholar.

Please feel free to ask us about our experiences and curriculum recommendations. We try to stock our Parent/Teacher collection with helpful resources and are open to suggestions and requests for new materials.

Exploring Kits

Posted on August 5, 2020 by GPL

You might have noticed a new addition to our website – Kids Kits. We’ve had requests for a list or even a menu of kits, and it seemed like the perfect time, especially now that our kits can be put on hold.

We have three main sections of kits – Early Learning, Beginning Reading, and STEAM. Here’s a few of my favorite kits from each section. If you need a kit recommendation or want to learn more, our librarians are happy to help.

Early Learning: Princess

Newly updated with fun bedtime books and even a Princess cookbook! The cape fits all ages – yes, even I can put it on.

Early Learning: Black and White

Our babies aren’t born with fully developed eyes. They slowly gain the ability to see color and focus on objects farther from their face. Providing high contrast black and white books is a great way to engage our littlest ones, especially during activities like tummy time!

Beginning Reading: Hot Dots

Hot dots are a fun way to learn words and sounds. With the smart pen enabled, kids can press the dots on each page, and the pen will tell them whether their guess is right.

Beginning Reading: Word Family Tiles

These fun tiles can be used to make different words. Best of all, they’re magnetic –– you can put a few on the fridge, dishwasher, or even a cookie sheet and let your kids sound out words to their hearts’ content.

STEAM: Capacity and Volume

Okay, serious question here: What kid doesn’t like playing with water? This fun, approachable kit lets your kiddos learn more about capacity and volume with hands-on measuring tools.

STEAM: Dinosaur Fossils

This is by far one of our favorite, best-circulating kits. Take a look at fossil replica teeth and claws, make rubbings of fossil arrangements, and learn more about dinosaurs. It’s the perfect kit for your budding paleontologist.

Rhyming is an Important Foundation for Reading

Posted on July 27, 2020 by GPL

It’s Rhyming Time, It’s Rhyming Time, Oh Yeah!

Rhyming Words (Echo)

Sound the Same(Echo)

At the End (Echo)

If you have heard Miss Anne’s storytime, you’ve heard this song. Our preschoolers sing this song with such enthusiasm. To them, this song is part of their normal storytime routine, but it is more than just a cute song. As the song progresses, Miss Anne calls out two rhyming words for them to practice. Then they repeat the song with different rhyming words. This is part of the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness curriculum, along with practicing onset fluency and final sounds. According to Heggerty, “Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words.” Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in speech.

One of the joys of my job is creating preschool learning stations that complement Miss Anne’s storytime. There is a rhyming station almost every week. Many of the activities come from two fabulous online sources, The Measured Mom and This Reading Mama. Some of their activities can be purchased, but many are free.

Here are six reasons why rhyming is important. The Measured Mom has an article on her blog with these reasons, but I also found them on several other websites including here.

Rhyming teaches children how language works. It helps them notice and work with the sounds within words.
Rhymes help children experience the rhythm of language. As they recite nursery rhymes they learn to speak with animated voices. Someday they’ll read with expression, too.
When children are familiar with a nursery rhyme or rhyming book, they learn to anticipate the rhyming word. This prepares them to make predictions when they read, another important reading skill.
Rhyming is important for writing, too. It can help children understand that words that share common sounds often share common letters. For example, the rhyming words cat and bat both end with –at.
When listening to rhyming songs and poems, children create a mental picture, expanding the imagination.
Because rhyming is fun, it adds joy to the sometimes daunting task of learning to read.

One of the early detection signs of dyslexia is not being able to rhyme. I can relate to this personally. My son has difficulty rhyming, although he has not been officially diagnosed with dyslexia.

Rhyming Books from our Beginning Reader Collection

Flip a Word Books by Harriet Ziefert

This is my favorite. Some of the pages have a cut out, showing that the ending sound is the same.