Tip 66 – Teach your child about patterns as they go from left to right.
Start this game with simple patterns and then progress to harder ones.
With an open checkerboard and two colors of checkers in front of you, place a few of them in a pattern on your side of the board. Then have your child place matching checkers in the corresponding squares on his or her side. Continue matching each other’s patterns as long as you both continue to enjoy it.
Parenting Insight…
While pattern awareness is a valuable skill, this particular game fosters the left-to-right reading progression.
“In order to learn to read you have to be able to cross the midline of your body with your eyes.”
Emergent Literacy!
You can’t get much more emergent than this! First you go through the pattern with checkers. Next you go through it with letters and words. Before long reading will be well under way. Makes sense to me!
Interesting reading tip – thanks for sharing. When I worked in a preschool we would place the paint brush on the left side of the paper during art time. That way, the kids had to reach over and go to the RIGHT in order to use it: left-to-right reading pattern – same thing!
Shara, thank you so much for sharing. Yes, reinforcing the left-to-right progression is very important on the pre-school level. With so much emphasis today on “high-tech,” it is wonderful to be reminded about the basics that come with good old-fashioned play-time fun.