cart In today’s society, children need a strong academic background to do well in school and beyond. Children that struggle with reading, organization, and learning new information will have difficulty mastering content as they continue their academic career.
While many parents recognize the importance of introducing their children to books and other learning materials at an early age, many have trouble understanding the most effective way to implement these resources. It can also be difficult for both parents and educators to find research-based educational resources that they can use to help a child succeed.
In order to combat these issues and help children take their learning to the next level, The Intellectual Child offers study guides, educational reference books, and other publications that will help children in each learning stage: The Intellectual Baby (approximately 0-2 years old), The Intellectual Toddler (approximately 2- 5 years old), and The Intellectual Child (approximately 6-13 years old).
These publications are a great resource for parents and educators to use with children because they provide age-appropriate instruction and practice for a variety of subjects and content areas including science, math, language arts, reading and literature, history, and geography.
Each of these guides is organized in a way that allows children to truly learn and master the presented content, and they are geared toward helping children develop critical and conceptual thinking skills, build background knowledge, and boost their cognition. With genre-specific learning solutions, publications from The Intellectual Child are a simple way for teachers and parents to support young intellectuals.
Here are a few The Intellectual Child educational publications that you can use to help your child or student grow academically, build a strong foundation for future success, and thrive in the classroom:
Teach Me How to Read
One of the best ways to help your child develop strong reading skills is to introduce them to phonics.
Phonics refers to the relationship between different sounds and the way these sounds are spelled. Emphasizing phonics instruction is important because understanding the relationship between sounds and spelling is the building block for helping children “sound out” words. Learning to decode, analyze, and process this information is critical for students to achieve success with reading.
While some people believe the misconception that this instruction is only necessary for children with learning disabilities like dyslexia, it is important for parents and educators to realize the importance of phonics. According to Scholastic, phonics instruction “plays a key role in helping students comprehend text.” Parents who want their children to have strong reading and reading comprehension skills need to prioritize teaching and practicing phonics at an early age. Scientific studies have shown that this explicit phonetic instruction is the most effective way to teach children how to read.
Without focused phonics practice, children will not know the different phonetic rules that allow them to decode and read words they have never been exposed to before. Considering that roughly 87% of all words in the English language are decodable, it is vital for children to receive phonics instruction at a young age so that they can learn how to decode words.
Although there is plenty of research to suggest just how invaluable it is for parents and educators to be intentional with phonics instruction, the trend in education today places less of an emphasis on phonics in order to make room for new Common Core comprehension reading , a renewed emphasis on foundational skills and vocabulary strategies are just as critical to reading fluency.
While these strategies are great, they should be supported with clear phonics instruction. That is where The Intellectual Child steps in. With their publication, Teach Me How to Read, children in the early learning stages like The Intellectual Toddler are exposed to the direct phonics instruction they need to develop their reading ability.
Using this Teach Me How to Read resource, parents will be able to approach phonics in a more intentional way, helping their child during a time when Common Core standards are increasingly phasing this instruction out of the classroom.
Teach Me How to Learn
While the ability to learn might not seem like a skill that needs development, children need to be taught how to learn efficiently if they want to make academic progress in the future. This process involves incorporating tools of “mega cognition”: organization, studying, abstracting information, and communication:
Organization
In order to do well in school, children need to be able to organize their thinking by gathering, categorizing, and retaining information about a variety of concepts.
At the Intellectual Baby stage, this might look like children understanding that there are different patterns for shapes, colors, and numbers. The Intellectual Baby will learn different rules for sounding out and decoding words and they will expand their schemas as they continue to develop. During the Intellectual Child learning stage, children will be able to utilize graphic organizers to organize their thoughts and they will be exposed to genre-specific reading material to help them with categorizing information.
The Intellectual Child publications like Teach Me How to Learn are research-based resources that parents can use to help their child develop and practice these organizational skills during each learning stage.
Studying
A major component of mega cognition and learning is the ability to study and understand new information. Studying involves children being able to acquire new information by reading, conducting research, observing the relationship between different concepts or patterns, and building background knowledge.
Teach Me How to Learn is a powerful tool that teachers can use to help their students and parents can use to help their young children during any learning stage. This resource exposes children to new content and learning materials they can use to develop an intellectual base of information and establish the background knowledge that they will need to master future content and do well in school.
Abstracting information
It is not enough for children to simply be able to receive and retain academic material and new information. In order for children to prepare for academic success, they need to be able to abstract meaning from their literature, texts, and math and science related learning materials.
A benefit of The Intellectual Child is that it provides resources like Teach Me How to Learn that shows parents the most effective way to support their children as they strengthen their ability to abstract information from different academic materials. With this tool in their arsenal, both parents and teachers will be able to make sure the children in their care are actually able to learn any presented content as they help these children progress toward academic growth.
Communication
After students are able to observe, organize, process, and understand information, they will then need to be able to demonstrate that they have learned the material. This involves being able to use written, oral, or graphic skills to show understanding of certain concepts and how that information can be applied to different concepts or areas of learning.
Teach Me How to Learn provides the learning materials and tools children need to learn how to express their knowledge and demonstrate mastery of a new concept. This will help them demonstrate their academic growth and breadth of knowledge to their teachers in an academic setting.
Organization, studying, abstracting information, and communication are essential for helping your child or student actually learn how to learn so that they can do well in an academic setting. The Intellectual Child recognizes just how valuable these four pillars are to a child’s future success in the classroom. The publications they offer, like Teach Me How to Learn, are strong learning solutions that can be used to help children during the Intellectual Baby, the Intellectual Toddler, and the Intellectual Child learning stages.
Academic Planner
Academic planners are useful tools for helping children, especially those at the Intellectual Child learning stage, learn how to monitor their academic achievement and practice sorting and categorizing relevant data and information about their learning.
The Intellectual Child offers many resources for children of all learning stages, including an academic planner that can be used by parents, educators, instructional coaches, and even children.
Here are two major benefits that come when parents and educators utilize The Intellectual Child academic planner for the children in their care:
Organizing and processing information
Organizational, processing, and critical thinking skills are integral skills that children need in order to do well in school. Parents can support their child’s academic development by using graphic organizers and similar tools to help children practice sorting, categorizing, and understanding new information.
With an academic planner from The Intellectual Child, children will be able to apply these skills to their own learning process and academic progress. This will work wonders for their ability to problem solve and think critically, which are essential skills for academic success.
Tracking reading progress
One of the most important ways through which parents and educators can provide academic support to the students in their care is to help them track their reading progress.
When students are able to see their growth, it helps them learn how their hard work and their practice with various learning materials directly contributes to their academic progress. Children that track their reading progress have a better idea about how their individual efforts relate to their larger goals. For instance, a student striving to improve their reading comprehension will have no way of knowing whether his or her comprehension has improved without some sort of measurable data to help pinpoint growth.
In addition to helping children visualize their own academic growth, allowing children to track their progress has proven benefits when it comes to achievement. A study conducted by educational researcher Robert J. Marzano found that allowing children to track their own academic progress has been associated with a 32 percentile point gain in achievement.
The best way for parents and educators to take advantage of the benefits correlated with the practice of having children track their reading progress is to provide the tools for them to do so. The Intellectual Child offers an academic planner that children can use to track their own reading progress and relate this progress to their academic goals.
Parents can also use these academic planners to track a child’s reading progress. While it is incredibly important for children to be involved in their own learning, it is also crucial that parents and educators are able to monitor growth as well. This will help them determine which learning materials, reading strategies, and techniques are effective when it comes to boosting a student’s reading ability so that they can adjust their teaching or reading materials accordingly.
Thanks to The Intellectual Child, parents can have an academic planner to chart their child’s reading progress and educators can have another resource to help monitor student achievement with reading.
Choosing The Intellectual Child
The Intellectual Child offers parents, educators, and instructional coaches solution guides, like Teach Me How to Read and Teach Me How to Learn, that they can use to help students develop the higher-order learning skills they need to do well in school and beyond. With these resources, as well as tools like The Intellectual Child Academic Planner, parents and teachers will be equipped to help children learn how to organize their thoughts, abstract and study information, communicate new ideas, think critically, and become better problem-solvers.
Whether your child or student is in the Intellectual Baby, Intellectual Toddler, or Intellectual Child learning stage, it is important that he is exposed to reading, vocabulary, and learning materials that will help him develop these skills and prepare for future academic success. In addition to simple exposure to these skills, it is also crucial for children to be able to learn metacognition so that they can apply these skills both inside and outside of the classroom setting.
The publication products offered by The Intellectual Child have the potential to completely transform a child’s reading comprehension, learning capabilities, and their ability to gather, process, and express new knowledge. Learn more about The Intellectual Child Publication Products when you visit our bookshop.
