The Triangle Base: Three Core Skills All Early Elementary Children Need To Enhance Learning

When parents want to prepare a healthy meal for their child, there are hundreds of cookbooks to guide them. But when a parent wants to prepare their child for school success, there are limited resources at their disposal. That is about to change! I am so happy to be contributing to this blog to show parents simple, fun, and effective ways to enhance their child's ability to learn.

Preschool and elementary-aged children need to develop a certain skill set before they can master learning. Experience has taught me that there are three main skills to be mastered.

I call these skills my "Triangle Base."

These skills are:

· Rhyming (This promotes Phonemic Awareness, a crucial pre-reading skill. Simply put, this is the ability to hear sounds in spoken language.)

· One-to-One Correspondence. (In math, this means seeing the numeral six, for example, and being able to count out six objects. In reading, it means that the child is saying what he or she is seeing.)

· Patterns. Recognizing and understanding both visual and auditory patterns. (An example of a visual pattern would be tile placement on a floor. An example of an auditory pattern would be the "E,I,E,I,O" refrain from the "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" song.)

These three important core skills form a solid base upon which most other educational skills can be built and sharpened. I'll be sharing some tips, games, activities, and resources to help your children learn these core skills and more! Together we will give your children a "head start" that will greatly improve their ability to reach their true academic potential. Hope you will check in often and add your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.