Actvity Objectives

Students using the Waterford Early Reading Program™ and Waterford Early Math and Science™ progress through a carefully defined sequence of songs, activities, and assessments. Each objective within the sequence is researched to ensure that students receive a consistently high-quality curriculum.

Below are some sample activities, listed along with research and objectives.

Objective: Become familiar with the letter sound associated with each letter.
Research: If children learn the letter names first, "their solid, overlearned familiarity with the letter names will, in itself, protect them from confusions" when they begin learning the sounds of the letters and their visual shapes (Mason 1980; Sulzby 1983; qtd. in Adams, 1990, 360).

Activity: After learning the "ABC Song," students learn simple songs that introduce each letter sound. The "Show and Tell Song" features a girl telling her class about her summer vacation. As she holds up animated pictures, she sings "Picked some /a/, /a/, apples, blew some /b/, /b/, bubbles" and so on.

Objective: Blend individual phonemes to make words. For example, the sounds /s/, /a/, and /t/ make the word sat.
Research: Blending phonemes to form words is identified by the National Reading Panel as one of the best methods to help students acquire phonemic awareness. In fact, blending scores obtained just prior to reading instruction are strong predictors of reading achievement all the way through grade four (Adams, 1990).

Activity: Students learn to blend phonemes to make words.

Objective: Practice budding reading skills and comprehension strategies.
Research: "Children build their storehouse of language from their communicative experiences and develop their concept of story from the stories they hear" (Cullinan, 1989, 37). "Regular and sustained reading increases children's reading vocabulary, which improves text understanding, making reading easier and boosting an interest in reading" (Au, Mason, and Scheu, 1995, 144).

Activity: Students read through rich, natural language that depicts the poor farmer Yosaku helping others on his lucky day.

Objective: Multiply numbers by 10.
Research: "Once children understand the process of multiplication and can represent multiplication situations with symbols, they are ready to focus on the number patterns and relationships that will help them internalize the basic multiplication facts . . . The search for patterns and relationships will help children learn multiplication facts in a much more powerful way than they would be simply memorizing the times tables" (Richardson, 1999, 135).

Activity: Students sing along with a skateboarding lion as they learn that "when you multiply by ten, you put a zero at the end."

Objective: Explore pitch and volume as properties of sound.
Research: "Playing around with strings and homemade instruments helps prepare children for future concept development in sound" (Charlesworth, 1999, 239).

Activity: Students explore pitch and volume by creating songs using a variety of musical instruments and common sounds.

Objective: Practice basic facts of multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction to achieve automaticity.
Research: "Practice is important because it can serve to make the use of rules, principles, and thinking strategies, as well as specific facts, automatic. Well-rehearsed knowledge can lead to the discovery of new relationships. The child can also use prescriptions and facts to process harder problems" (Baroody, 1987, 184).

Activity: Bango is one of many games students select from to practice speed and automaticity of recently learned basic facts. Students are scored on accuracy and speed.