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Know what to expect about your child's growth

Teach Yourself Your Baby's Development is your step-by-step guide to your child's development, from birth to preschool.It also addresses the special needs of pre-term babies and multiples.

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The preschool years are by far the most valuable for building character and instilling a love of learning. Mommy, Teach Me! author Barbara Curtis, a Montessori teacher and mother of twelve, will help you tune into your child's developmental needs and show you how to turn every day at home into a learning adventure your child will never forget.

This user-friendly guide is filled with hands-on exercises that will release your child's independence, sense of order, concentration, self-control, and other basic skills-the kind of early experiences that will give your child a lifetime educational advantage.

For any parent, grandparent, or teacher seeking a better understanding of children and wishing to make the most of the preschool years-including memorable introductions to math, science, geography, fine arts, and spiritual life-Mommy, Teach Me! is the place to begin.

"Mommy, Teach Me! gives parents the tools to help them bring out the best in their child and the best in themselves. This book will help you discover your God-given abilities so that you can help your child better discover hers or his."-Drs. William and Martha Sears

Barbara Curtis has published more than 700 articles and eight books about education and parenthood. She also writes the internationally popular Mommy Life blog, is an AMI certified Montessori teacher, and leads workshops for mothers from all walks of life on reading and other learning topics. Barbara and her husband, Tripp, have twelve children and live in Waterford, Virginia. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Great foundation
This book is just great. While some of activities do seem simple, they are designed to help build concentration and independence. The activities are a great " base" to start from and then add in your activities as adapted for your child.

I would not buy this book specifically for the activities but more for the message it holds- that kids can do things and WANT to so we should give them the opportunity. It has a very nurturing message all while promoting independence. Just reading through the first few chapters of the book, I was able to take a step back and look at how I am approaching things with my daughter and then keep the things I feel are working well and adapt things as needed.

I checked this book out from my library and am now buying a copy of it, and "Mommy Teach me to Read" for myself.

huge help!
I have always loved kids, and I even love teaching, but I never knew what the heck to do with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. When my oldest was almost two I decided I should probably start learning fast, and this is the book that caught my eye first.
It's helped me so much to have a better understanding of how small children learn, what they need to learn, and how to teach them. The author has a very charming writing style, and her approach is very practical and doable. Highly recommend it.

Mommy, Teach Me!
I am new to homeschooling and wanted some resources that would be helpful for how to begin the process of teaching our young ones.This book gave many great ideas for preparing preschoolers for more formal schooling using the montessori approach to learning.Would recommend!

Don't Waste Your $
I have read tons of books on educating preschoolers, and this one is the worst.The suggested activities are nothing that I couldn't think of on my own.If you are an evangelical christian, you may enjoy the first half of the book a lot more than I do.

A Book that Fills the Need!
I love how Maria Montessori really recognized the potential of a child in learning. She recognized the absorbent mind at the young ages, and illustrated how there are different sensitive periods of learning. It's easy to recognize how children need the tangible, sensory types of learning at a young age. She really did see the beautiful gifts of a young child, and tried to respect the child.

I am so excited that I found the missing link for me for incorporating Montessori approach in the home for the younger ages. I bought Mommy, Teach Me! and Mommy, Teach Me to Read! Both are slim volumes, packed with encouragement and information, but not intimidating or overwhelming. I would say she's a modern Elizabeth Hainstock, but makes the Montessori in the home even more parent friendly and less intimidating and scientific. The emphasis isn't about making one's own materials, like Hainstock, but more about making it all approachable and doable for mothers in the home.

Mrs. Curtis is a mother of twelve and homeschools her children and does understand the needs of a child and busy SAH moms. She had AMI training and taught Montessori in the classroom. She shares her knowledge and experience with other parents. She recognizes the role of God and our spiritual lives in education.

Mommy, Teach Me! explains your preschooler can thrive at home because "The Best Teacher is Forever"..."The Best Classroom Has No Walls"..."The Best Instruction Doesn't Stop at Noon"...and "The Best Foundation is Love."

This isn't a purist Montessori approach, but a gentle family friendly approach. Mrs. Curtis gently describes how to present to a child, but that presentations aren't just those 3 hour periods, but all day -life -- with the child. I totally recognize that when I teach my children, I'm also learning, probably five times more. I'm learning to be calm, deliberate, patient, gentle, leading but not forceful. I'm learning to be a better parent. Of course I'm a work in progress, but her books do give me encouragement! I'm also learning self-discipline by creating order and to help my sons thrive.

The presentations in this book cover the basic exercises like pouring, using tongs, sequencing, etc. They are recognizable as simple Montessori presentations, but in a friendly home environment, not segregated from family life. She has lots of applicable ideas in shopping trips, laundry, and other daily chores. The other chapters cover Manipulatives, Imaginative Play, Beginning Math, Science, Geography, Fine Arts, and Spiritual Life.

The previous negative reviewer must not have been familiar with any Montessori, because she would have recognized the practical life and simple exercises found in all Montessori classrooms. And ask any child if pouring rice or beans is different than water, and they would say yes! Each skill is built on...you wouldn't want to start with water with a small child who has never done any pouring.

And all these exercises are building up hand motions, eye-hand coordinations, left-to-right movements as building blocks in learning to read and write.

I highly recommend this book and her "Mommy, Teach me to Read!" books to help any parent realize that teaching isn't just a professional's job, and learning happens especially in the home and the family, not in classrooms. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Awesome!
This book is great! It is an easy read and provides VERY helpful and strait forward information in helping a first time teacher (such as myself). It also gives great suggestions. I would recommend this book ... Read more

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Children love to pretend, and dramatic play is the perfect environment for children to practice and apply literacy concepts. Whether they decide to be firefighters, to open a pet store, or to have a tea party, children will increase their vocabulary, communicate with their peers, and learn to recognize environmental print--all important skills for prereaders. Literacy Play is chock-full of creative dramatic play activities that teach important pre-reading skills while bringing children's imaginations to life!

Amy Cox has been a supervising teacher in the Melba S. Lehner Children's School at Weber State University for the past nine years.

Sherrie West is a mentor teacher for Head Start at the Ogden Area Community Action Agency.

Customer Reviews (2)

love it
love it; great ideas for dramatic play and literacy activities; my preschooler loves doing them and it's time well spent;the best learning takes place when kids don't feel they're being "schooled" and this definitely fits the bill

This book had great ideas and printables!!!!
This book had great ideas for any dramatic play area.
I have used quite a few in my dramatic play area at school.
I also enjoyed the printables in the back of the book. ... Read more

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''Ann Lewin-Benham recognized the power of the Reggio Approach early on, and has done as much as any American to bring it to the attention of educators....those interested in learning about documentation, assessment, projects, and group learning, in the Reggio mode, will receive an excellent introduction here.'' --From the Foreword by Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education

''Ann Lewin-Benham has given us a wonderful account of the famous Reggio Emilia schools: a book that is inspiring, theoretically suggestive, and practical all at the same time. More than ever we need to re-think what kind of schooling works, and Powerful Children is a great contribution to that discourse.'' --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University

In Possible Schools, Ann Lewin-Benham showed us that we can create schools that engage the minds of children and involve parents, even in urban settings. In this book, she describes projects in a school that successfully adapted the Reggio Approach with Head Start-eligible children. She explains how to use the Reggio Approach to address current major concerns in early education, including helping children become self-disciplined, making sure children are ready for 1st grade, assessing children s progress, and laying a foundation for literacy. Presenting a multitude of examples of excellent preschool practice, this dynamic book introduces the concept of ''significant work'' that draws deeply on young children's innate intelligences, provides teachers with an opportunity to reflect on what they know and understand about young children, illustrates how teachers can make changes in their classrooms to expand and improve learning, describes robust activities from an urban preschool, including how each project relates to a particular teaching principle, and suggests more clearly defined standards and lays out policy implications for each. ... Read more

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This must-have resource combines the latest in education theory and best-practice instruction in an easy-to-navigate format that teachers will want to keep close at hand. Filled with helpful strategies, tips, and insights from veteran teachers across the country, the book covers essential topics of instruction, planning, management, and professional growth. Also includes updated standards and technology sections, a complete glossary of education terms, and a new index. ... Read more

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Awaken your child's love of books
Teach Yourself Helping Your Child to Read shows you how to develop your child's skills and foster a love of books from an early age. From discovering the benefits of singing and rhyming together to learning letters and later helping them at school, it gives you all the practical advice you need to confidently help your child, whatever their age and reading ability.

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Help make spelling stick with these engaging, original songs that teach students how to tackle silent letters (e.g., autumn, doubt), double consonants (dinner/diner, filled/filed), homophones (allowed/aloud, pause/paws), contractions (let's, you're), and so much more. Includes song sheets, background information, and fun activities. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

not very good
this was not what I expected. I found it to be uninspiring, slow, and ho hum.My kids were not engaged at all.

Skip this one
I couldn't listen to the complete song on any of the tracks so I couldn't image myself doing it with 30 5th graders. I'm looking for something better. ... Read more

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The first 5 years of a child's life are a time of tremendous
physical, emotional, social, and cognitive growth. Noting that research shows that children are more likely to succeed in learning when their families actively support them, this booklet is intended for families and caregivers who want to help their preschool children learn and develop the skills
necessary for success in school-and in life.

The major portion of the booklet contains simple activities for use with children.Activities for infants include developing trust. For toddlers, activities include playing with puppets and using objects as musical instruments. For preschoolers, activities
include getting along, rhymes, and matching sounds and letters. The booklet also offers suggestions for improving the transition to kindergarten, monitoring children's television viewing, and choosing child care. The booklet concludes with a 21-item bibliography and a "ready-for-school" checklist. ... Read more

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Simple and FREE
This book synthesizes the best and most simple ways to support your child's development (emotionally, cognitively, socially, and physically) at home.

No more, more less.

[...] ... Read more

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For those who devour Comprehending Math as I did, their teaching will be clearer, bolder, more connected. And for the ultimate beneficiaries, they will have a chance to understand just how integrally our world is connected.
Ellin Oliver Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought

Customer Reviews (1)

Linking reading comprehension strategies with math instruction
This is a great resource for linking reading comprehenshion strategies with math instruction. Vingettes of lessons for each strategy are provided. This book is a "must have" for elementary teachers! ... Read more

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Learning to Teach in the Primary Classroom is structured to be of maximum value to the students beginning pre-service training and is divided into six chapters, each covering an important area of practice. Subjects included are planning, classroom organization and management, teaching strategies, assessment, self-appraisal and professional development. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Creative Themed Activities
As a teacher and mother of two, I owned a large collection of children activity books and was extremely pleased with my purchase of "And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon".Each featured rhyme or song is grouped with Related Songs, Chants and Rhymes, Follow Up Questions to promote discussion, Language Enrichment Ideas, Extension Activities, and Outdoor Play or Music and Movement Activities.All activities are themed to go with the featured rhyme.Not only are several creative activities given, but you can also use them as a spring board for other activities of your own.Whether you are having a day of themed activities at home to brighten a Monday afternoon, or a Day Care Provider who is trying to create a fun classroom curriculum, this book is a wonderful resource.The activities are easy to do, appropriate for young toddlers, and physical, emotional, or cognitive development skills are clearly identified.Pam Schiller and Thomas Moore's other book "Where is Thumbkin" is similarly designed, but specifically geared for older children (4-6). ... Read more

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Invite children to sing along and learn how to follow directions, a key to success in school! This full-color, illustrated book with audio CD includes lively original songs that encourage active listening. The toe-tapping tunes and fun lyrics also help young children build oral language and early literacy skills! Includes song sheets and easy, learning-filled activities. ... Read more

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Help young learners build important skills with these unique reproducible booklets. As children learn key early literacy concepts and develop essential vocabulary, they’ll be intrigued by the engaging formats, shape books, flip books, accordion books, a ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Can this be real?
I bought this book to teach my granddaugher.She is 6 months old. I can't wait to get started and see if it works.

How to Teach Your Monkey Math
How To Teach Your Baby Math: The Gentle Revolution

That book was a big waste of time and money. I bought it hoping to find something interesting, but instead this just confirmed what I knew about the author.

What a shame to see Glenn Doman capitalizing on the back of gullible and uninformed parents. His theories have been debunked long ago. Here is a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in 1968, 1982 AND 1999: "The use of flash cards is based on the theory of "Psychomotor Patterning" by Glenn Doman, which is NOT theoretically proven to be valid"

What has been proven is that children (and even adults) can't make an instant estimate of quantities above 8 to 10 units. Frenetically flashing cards with 40 dots in front of your kid does nothing but entertain him by a looney parent making funny faces and caring for them (the good part). Doman's "whole word" flashcards language methods are equally as bad. In case you still haven't noticed everywhere around you, the best way to learn English is Phonics.

Doman is right about one thing, the learning power of young children is greatly underestimated. You can use his book if you want to teach your Monkey math, or you could get some apples and oranges and teach your baby about the real world and quantities around them.

A must read for all new parents
This is an awesome book, along with a companion book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read.I only wish we had had knowledge of this book and method when our children were babies 45-50 years ago. We're trying to spread the word to all we know about the gold that's hidden within it's covers.How To Teach Your Baby Math: The Gentle Revolution

...Bogus
If you are trying to transform your kid into some precocious and burnt out counting monkey (with no guarantee to succeed, by the way) buy this book...no, actually, don't, it's a big waste of time and you may even risk to harm your baby mind in the process!

I was searching for a manual describing intelligent methods to stimulate my newborn kid creativity and abstract thinking, the basis for mathematical thinking and much more, and I run into Dr. Doman's book. I am not a fan of this kind of books, but I learned about his commendable activity with brain injured kids (that is an area where Dr. Doman may have more credibility and likely stands on more solid grounds, it seems) and thought to give a try at his approach to early math education.

It was a total disappointment. As other have pointed out, the style of writing is repetitions and boring, but I can live with that, the target reader has probably a wide range of education backgrounds. What he has to say could be easily condensed in one page, but worse, the method he proposes sounded totally bogus since the get-go. He tries to teach kids from 6 mo to 2 years age numbers and calculations using dozens of flash cards with bright red dots shown to the baby at a fast rate as the stepping stone to more complex tasks. In the end visual/auditory memorization and repetition seem to be the key factors in this approach. For a few kids this method seems to produce the expected result, but my question is: do we really want or need that result? fast counting monkeys no more intelligent than the next kid playing with wood blocks and crayons? From my independent assessment of his methods, I understand that there is no research whatsoever supporting his claims, at best some anecdotical data exist from the teaching in his expensive courses at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. It seems to me that the most likely outcome will be boring your infant to death, followed on the extreme by transforming her/him into a counting machine who will likely hate science, math, and probably you, for the rest of her adult life. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek book "Einstein Never Used Flashcards" pushes this conclusion (that book seems a better investment, at least she cites some technical literature), much research on young kids' education seems to indicate that capacity for abstraction matures around 5-6 years of age (it is no chance that that is the normal school age across the entire planet!) and that kids pushed into being home-made precocious geniuses may be less creative, curious and flexible later in life. Who wants that? Before you consider buying this book, take time to read this article:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/10/28/rush_little_baby/

That alone would have saved me a few bucks. My current personal conclusion is that creative play, parental engagement, talking and reading (anything!) to your kids are better bets for growing creative and curious individuals ready to operate in the economy of tomorrow. bottom line, I consider this purchase my personal charity to Dr. Doman other's endeavors...no more than that.

Great Info for new parents
Babies don't come with instructions so every piece of information helps,
what I learned in this book applies to many areas of every day teaching, learning and understanding. Short enough to find time to read, and interesting. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, published by Early Childhood Australia Inc. (ECA) on June 1, 2009. The length of the article is 3386 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: THE MOST PRESSING NEED in early childhood mathematics education in the United States is to improve early childhood teacher preparation. A Web-based video system, "Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL)," is a novel and effective approach for teacher preparation integrated into early childhood mathematics education courses. With extensive analysis of videos involving children's mathematical thinking, VITAL provides prospective teachers with engaging and intellectually stimulating hands-on and minds-on learning experiences that supplement the traditional textbook and readings.

Citation Details
Title: Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL): analyzing videos online to learn to teach early childhood mathematics.(Report)
Author: Joon Sun Lee
Publication: Australasian Journal of Early Childhood (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2009
Publisher: Early Childhood Australia Inc. (ECA)
Volume: 34Issue: 2Page: 19(5)

Article Type: Report

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

excellent book!!
Reading for Real is an outstanding book about authentic reading and conversation around books and authors.Any second through fifth grade teacher would greatly benefit from the organization and thinking presented in this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to bring together independent reading and reading with conversation.Excellent book!

Disappointing
I am a huge Lucy Calkins fan, so I was thrilled to buy this book,as it is written by one of her "people".This book is a very long look at Book Clubs within the reading workshop classroom. A very long,overly detailed look........

The basic gist is that heterogenous groups of students should have time throughout the school year to meet over a basket of books that are grouped for some reason and close to some of their reading levels. They should be given instruction and time to have authentic conversations and interactions with the books. While I love this idea,it is not new and not so involved that it needs an entire book devoted to this one component of reading workshop.Instead of this book, I would highly recommend Debbie Miller's Reading With Meaning. It covers this idea thoroughly,plus so much more. ... Read more

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Learning to Teach in the Early Years Classroom helps teacher education students understand the complexities of teaching in early years' classrooms. It integrates research and theory with practice through vignettes, based on authentic classroom case studies, in order to show students how educators make decisions and achieve expected outcomes. Students are further encouraged to examine teaching practices through the experiences of Sam Davis, an imagined teacher of Prep/Grade 1, in the Junior Primary team at Aubrey Primary School. Engaging and analytical the book gives voice to the many stakeholders involved in a child's development: from principles to teachers; from families and children of diverse backgrounds to pre-service teachers on field placement. ... Read more