Language and Thinking for Young Children

by Ruth Beechick

Jam-packed with wonderful language activities, this book provides parents and teachers with a year's course of oral language study for children who do not yet read or who are just beginning to read. Learn how to turn every day experiences into valuable learning experiences. Lights the spark of creativity in the parent as well as the student. Working together in the home schooling movement, Beechick and Nelson saw a need to help homeschool parents round out beginning programs with rich language experiences. This book is the result of the collaboration of their educational expertise

Genres: Education

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 1988

About the author

Dr. Ruth Beechick spent a lifetime teaching and studying how people learn. She taught in Washington state, Alaska, Arizona and in several colleges and seminaries in other states. She also spent thirteen years at a publishing company writing curriculum for churches. In "retirement" she wrote for the homeschool movement. Her degrees are A.B. from Seattle Pacific University, M.A.Ed. and Ed.D. from Arizona State University.

Reviews

[Laura (Book Scrounger) · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

This book is fairly dated, but I'd say we still found it about 50% useful as a supplement to kindergarten language arts.

We enjoyed the "stories" unit, as it included some well-known stories but also a particularly funny one we hadn't heard before. The poetry unit had some good poems in it as well (though it would probably have been redundant with some of what we were already doing).

Overall, I think it's a case where you can take what works for you and leave the rest. There were plenty of good ideas here to help remind parents of what kinds of things children should know and learn, especially for pre-reading skills, and a lot of them were things that could be integrated into everyday life. One of our favorites was the idea of going to the grocery store and letting your child pick one fruit they have never tried before (and then repeat it with a vegetable the next week). That was fun, and I think helped us appreciate the variety of food we have access to.

There are other ideas that help give children awareness about the world around them, and some that remind parents what kinds of things are useful for children to memorize (parents' names, address, phone number, etc.).

This isn't really something to read straight through, at least for me, but it was helpful to page through everything over the course of a year to glean the best ideas, though we skipped plenty too -- I thought the manners unit was a bit too focused on gender roles for my tastes, and there are other fairly dated aspects. Overall a nice resource, though I'm curious what else is out there along this vein that's a bit more modern.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a great guide of activities to help young children develop skills, and work with the world around them. Parents can help educate their children in a useful guided way, following this book.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

More useful as a reference guide to skills and topics that you may not have discussed with your children yet than as a book that you sit and read through. Manners, phone etiquette, who to call in an emergency, fables. . . etc.

[Kerri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent homeschooling book for parents of pre-K or K students. It teaches more than language. There are sections on manners, answering the phone, learning you address, etc.

[Stephanie]

good resource to own with practical real life ways of teaching children using easily found objects.

[Marieli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great to get you started teaching your preschooler early reading skills, whether you will be homeschooling or not.