Guest Blog Post

Unique Scrap Designs

06/28/2020 by admin

This is a Guest Post by Danna Rodebush from Unique Scrap Designs. Enjoy!

I am so excited to be joining you today for a FREEBIE!

Hi! My name is Danna Rodebush, and I am the face behind Unique Scrap Designs. I am wife to my high school sweetheart, Mom to two silly boys and a Chocolate Lab, and 5th grade teacher in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I am living my lifelong dream of teaching, as I knew as a young girl that I was born to be a teacher. Life’s paths took me in a different direction in college when I went into the dental field as a dental hygienist, but I found my way back into education when my oldest son hit kindergarten! I couldn’t imagine not going back to school to get my teaching license at that point! So that is exactly what I did… and WOW am I glad that I did! I absolutely love my job!

I have been in the classroom now going on six years, and I have been a graphic designer for over ten years. I started on Etsy with card designs and have just recently started creating awesome teacher resources using my love of education mixed with my design background. I would love for you to come visit me! Be sure to FOLLOW ME so you can stay updated on my NEWEST PRODUCTS!

Now for what you have been waiting for… I have been creating LOTS AND LOTS of DIGITAL, INTERACTIVE activities to keep students engaged IN THE CLASSROOM or to use FOR DISTANCE LEARNING. One of my recent products is a set of INTERACTIVE GRAMMAR activities.

Interactive Grammar Bundle Unique Scrap Designs Kinney Brothers Publishing

You can try WEEK ONE FREE today! You won’t be disappointed! It has a lot to offer your students! Just click the image below to try it out!

Unique Scrap Designs Freebie Interactive Grammar Activities Kinney Brothers Publishing

Within the download are links to the four units and a BUNDLE that includes all four units. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today! I hope to see you on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Activities to Develop Learning and Motor Skills for Preschool Children

09/17/2019 by admin

Activities to Develop Learning and Motor Skills Ryan Howard Kinney Brothers Publishing

Many thanks to Ryan Howard of SmartParentAdvice for this month’s guest post! Photo credits: Pixels.com

One of the great joys of parenthood is watching your kids grow up, learn new things, and develop new skills. As a parent, it’s natural to want to help your child out along the way. In this article, I’m covering a whole range of different activities that promote learning and help preschoolers develop their motor skills.

Fun Activities That Promote Learning

Reading tops this list of educational activities. When your kids are really young, this activity mostly consists of parents reading and children passively soaking it all in. But, as your kids hit preschool age, they will be able to take a more active role. This might mean identifying letters on some pages, or even entire words with a little practice.

Games that involve numbers or counting can be a great way to get an early start on those math skills. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about games that you would think of as numbers games here. Let’s say your playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. After the hippos have gobbled up all of the marbles, you might leave it to your preschooler to count up the totals for each player to determine the winner. There are tons of games that involve numbers or score keeping. By letting your child take the lead in scoring the game, you’re introducing learning into something really fun.

A Few Ways To Develop Motor Skills

When it comes to motor skills, there are a couple of different kinds. Fine motor skills involve sophisticated, small movements of hands and fingers. Gross motor skills involve movements of large muscle groups. Walking, running, and jumping all come to mind.

Fine Motor Skills

One of the best ways to develop fine motor skills is with artwork, Whether your little one is coloring with crayons or standing and painting at an easel, they are working on their fine motor skills.

Legos and building blocks are another great way to develop a preschooler’s fine motor skills. After all, manipulating these small objects is no easy task.

Want a little help in the kitchen? Invite your preschooler to do some baking with you. Combining ingredients together, and working with dough will both help in the fine motor skills department.

Gross Motor Skills

Want to work on your child’s gross motor skills? Head over to the nearest playground. Most playgrounds have all sorts of activities that help with gross motor skills. Climbing is a particularly great one since it involves doing things that you child doesn’t necessarily get to do on a daily basis.

Swimming is another great gross motor skill activity. Kicking and splashing in the water is fun and great exercise too.

Want to keep things simple? Just run around together. You might even challenge your preschooler to a race or two. Here’s a pro tip if you go that route though: let them win. Trust me, everyone will have more fun if they win the race.

Final Thoughts

The great thing about preschoolers is that there are all sorts of fun activities that promote development too. By the time your kids reach high school, learning might involve cracking the books which may or may not be their favorite thing in the world. For preschoolers though, learning and playing can be one in the same.

Ryan Howard runs SmartParentAdvice, a site that provides parenting advice for moms and dads. Ryan writes about all of the different ups and downs of parenting, provides solutions to common challenges, and reviews products that parents need to purchase for babies and toddlers.

If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog site, please contact us at admin@kinneybrothers. We are always looking for educational content our readers will find useful.

Benefits of Learning a Second Language at an Early Age

08/29/2019 by admin

This month’s guest post is by New Zealand writer, Harper Reid. Enjoy!

A child’s brain soaks up knowledge faster than any other age. Early childhood is the best time to foster new learning and teach a child a second, or even third, language. Young brains are in the perfect position to gain knowledge. Learning a second language while the brain is young is easier, and more beneficial than at any other time!

What’s the Best Time to Start?

The quick answer is as soon as possible. The earlier you can teach the child, the better. Brains of all ages will benefit from learning a second language, but preschool-age children make the best students. Children at this age are inquisitive and curious and will try out their newly acquired skills without fear. Children have also shown to be less fearful of mimicking sounds and adopting pronunciation.

Getting started is always the hardest part. It can help to show that learning isn’t a chore – it can be fun. Make it fun by using books, videos and learning apps to stimulate the child’s knowledge. Use small rewards and incentives to get them to their goals. Give them sweet treats or take a trip to the park, use your imagination. A child will be excited to learn a new language when it is taught in a fun way.

Networking

To land that perfect job, communication skills are an absolute must. One of the massive advantages of learning a secondary language at an early age is that the child now has the ability to communicate to a wider audience. If the child had never learned this language, the possibility of wider communication would never exist. The skills the child has learned may mean they find work overseas in industries that would have been inaccessible without the language.

If for no other reason, the child’s second language may also help them network in a personal capacity. Sure, it may help the child find work that they enjoy in the future, but it may also enable them to make friends. Imagine never having met a best friend because of a language barrier. Learning languages early sets a child up with networks that will remain for life.

Brain Function

There is no doubt that being able to communicate in one way engages different areas of the brain. Children who have learned languages from a young age have been shown to display cognitive advantages.

Cognitive advantages are illustrated through better abilities with problem-solving and creativity. As well as a better ability to think outside of the box. Enhancing this brain function well requires more than the learning of the language though. To encourage a complete learning experience, learning about culture is also useful. Learning is best done in person. If the means are available, traveling is a great way to achieve this.

Children need the ability to use their senses to learn. Touch, smell, taste, hear and see. The child will flourish when they see their ability to communicate work. In this new environment, being able to hold a conversation is an adrenaline rush that can foster confidence. If traveling is too expensive creating an at-home experience of different cultures is another great way to achieve this. This could include engaging in imaginative play to engage their language skills or exposure to foreign movies, music and cultural traditions.

Children Learn by Copying

From a young age, children love to imitate the people around them, from their parents to their teachers. This allows children to forge a better understanding of what they are learning. The more knowledgeable their teacher is, the more likely a child will retain the information they learn. This is particularly handy for teachers that are bilingually gifted.

Early childhood is the prime age to teach children a new language, fostering confidence and knowledge that they can carry with them throughout their lives. It will help them to find jobs within networks that aren’t open to most of us.

Harper Reid is a Kiwi wordsmith based in Auckland, New Zealand. She regularly produces content for blogs and local sites. Head over to her Tumblr page to see more of her published work.

Bounce Learning Kids

03/01/2019 by admin

This is an interview with Christopher D. Morgan of Bounce Learning Kids with a special lineup of educational products for your regular, special needs, or English language classes. Enjoy!

Q. You have a lot of products in your TpT store. How and why did you get into making education resources?

A. I began making them for my own two children and it developed from there. I’ve always been a hands-on father and I wanted to be involved with my children’s education from the get-go. Right around the time I was using flashcards to teach them word sounds, I went online to find resources to help me. I quickly found the quality of what was out there wanting so I decided to build my own.

Q. What was your very first resource?

A. I wanted to teach the kids the difference between consonants and vowels. The problem was that at that age, the very words ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’ are themselves difficult words for a small child, which I quickly discovered when I tried to explain this in words. With the kids sporting classic deer in the headlight stares, I decided to ‘show’ them instead of ‘tell’ them. I went to my graphics workstation and fiddled around until I came up with a comb design, which I thought would do the trick. It shows the alphabet twice, once with all the vowels enclosed in a block and once with all the consonants enclosed. The two blocks fit together like two combs. The idea was that it would visually convey the fact that a letter can either be a vowel or a it can be a consonant but not both.

Q. Where did Bounce Learning Kids comes from?

A. Because of the success of my vowels and consonants design, I was spurred on to make more resources. Over the next few months, I churned out lots more of them. Eventually, a parent from one of my kids’ playmates saw some of the resources and suggested I share them so that other parents could benefit from them. I thought nothing of it but quickly found my designs were being well-received. I got so many positive comments, which of course only spurred me on more. Before I knew it, I had around 2,000 designs in my portfolio. A good friend suggested I turn it into a business, and thus Bounce Learning Kids was born.

Q. What makes your products different?

A. I design my products first and foremost to function correctly. They must be visually appealing and interesting. Otherwise, the child simply isn’t going to enjoy using them.

Q. Aren’t all education resources supposed to be that way?

A. You’d think so, but that’s sadly not the case. My kids started coming home from school with worksheets, for example. Frankly, I was appalled at the poor quality of them. When I went online again to try to find better ones, I found it was a common trait almost everywhere I looked. I could find plenty of worksheets, but they were all designed more to get the parents to download them than to work correctly as education resources. Oftentimes I’d find numeracy or literacy sheets, for example, where a couple of clip-art graphics were included to ‘make them look more like children’s resources’ but that was about it. The quality really wasn’t there. They would either be boring and uninspiring or simply ineffective as learning tools – or both! This infuriated me to no end. Once again, I thought I could do better, so I started making my own worksheets but built them from the ground up to function correctly first and foremost. I very rarely ‘pretty them up’ by adding infantile clip-art images. When other people do that, it makes me cringe. I think there’s a real danger of being condescending to the kids by treating them that way.

Q. What makes your resources function better than others?

A. It’s all about making them functional but also visually appealing and interesting. Worksheets (which is just a fancy term for a printed page of information that the child must write onto) fall into two basic categories. They are either ‘instructional’ or ‘testing’. That is to say they either ‘teach’ (convey new information) or they gauge the child’s level of understanding (testing their knowledge). Many of my worksheets both teach and test at the same time. They are also designed to be visually appealing, interesting and, most importantly of all, fun. Who wants to do simple learning by wrote when you can have an engaging and fun worksheet that’s an actual pleasure to complete? If you disguise the learning by encapsulating it in play, it takes the stress out of learning.

Here are some of the Literacy products in my line-up:

Hands-on Reading 2 — Coordinate grids ‘B’

Calendar time ‘E’ — Compound words ‘B’

A versus AN ‘D’ — Apostrophe ‘A’

Q. Do you specialize on Literacy products?

A. I do have quite a few Literacy resource kits in my portfolio, but I have many more products that hit other disciplines as well. At the moment, my resources fall into one of six broad categories:

Numeracy
Literacy
Time
Money
Visual perception
Hand-eye coordination

I currently have over forty separate and distinct Literacy resources, some of which contain over a hundred separate pages of content, and I’m adding to the line-up all the time.

Here are some of my other products just to give you a taste of the range of subjects I cover:

Money search (US) ‘A’ — Number snake H

Maths code 2 ‘A’ — 3D Nets 3 ‘K’

Symmetry fun ‘C’ — Learn to tell the time – Free!

Q. Where do you get your inspirations from?

A. It can come from anywhere. If the kids bring home something from school and I think it could be improved, I sit down and improve it. If I see something online that I think can be done better, I sit down and make something better. Most of the time, however, I come up with ideas that meet a specific need I’m trying to fill at the time. As a graphics artist, I think visually. I’m always trying to find ways to convey information in visual short form. The adage ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ is something I live and breathe.

Q. How do you know if a product is going to work or not?

A. I do a lot of testing. My kids and my wife are my first line of testers. If a new product passes muster with them, I then try them in a classroom setting. Sometimes I need to tweak something. For example, a recent product I made wasn’t clear once printed on a laser printer. Some key graphic elements just weren’t clear enough and I had to make some adjustments.

The biggest factor in determining whether a product is successful or not is whether the kids have fun with them or not. If they don’t have fun, the product doesn’t survive, and I move on to something better.

Being forced to fill out boring worksheets is a terrible thing for a child – especially if they aren’t enjoying themselves. On the other hand, there’s nothing so rewarding for me than seeing the light bulb switch on in a child’s mind when they are actively engaged. I mean really, why should worksheets be boring, right?

Special thanks to Mr. Morgan for his guest post on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog. To see the full lineup of educational materials, you can visit Bounce Learning Kids on Teachers Pay Teachers or visit his website at https://bouncelearningkids.com.

Author and creator of education resources for school children and people for whom English is a second language, Christopher has visited 45 countries to date and has lived and worked in four countries across three continents. He currently resides in the Netherlands but has lived and worked in England, Florida & Australia. He is the author of the Portallas series of young adult fantasy adventure novels. An IT manager by day, Christopher enjoys writing novels and building quality education resources. He is a family man with a wife of over 30 years and two children.