Tag: learning

As easy as ABC – Teaching the alphabet to your pre-schooler

Letters are important – they are the building blocks towards a lifetime of reading, writing and learning and should not be taught solely with paper pencil worksheets. Instead, parents can plan entertaining yet educational activities their child will enjoy taking part in. There is no better way to help kids learn the letters of the alphabet than by making the learning fun.

Any alphabet learning activity you begin with your child should last only five to ten minutes per day depending on your child. As a parent, you already know the length of your child’s attention span and can time each activity accordingly. Also, plan only one activity per session introducing five letters at a time. Learning the alphabet in no particular order is difficult for children, howevert is a key skill needed for their success as readers. Keeping activities short and engaging will make an enormous difference to children as they begin to learn the basics of reading.

Here are some ideas you might like to try at home.

Letter of the day

Nominate a letter of the day – for example the letter S – and plan a couple of activities around that. For example, print and color coloring sheets of a favourite character such as Spongebob Squarepants whose initials are SS and at sites like Spongebob Coloring Pages you’ll find the best Spongebob colouring. Also, eat food beginning with S such as sausages or sweetcorn and do some of the other activities mentioned in this article involving the letter S.

Bath time foam letters

Parents can purchase a bucket of foam letters from any dollar store. These letters are fabulous fun for a young learner in the bathtub. Parents can place letters on the side of the bathtub, spell our words and review letters.

Shaving cream letters

Parents take a cookie sheet or spray shaving cream directly on your kitchen table. Ask your child to smooth out the cream to form a square. Hold your child’s index finger and assist him with forming a letter. Then ask your child to wipe that letter away and begin again.

Letter art

Using bingo dabbers or finger paints have your child create one large uppercase letter filling the entire space of an A4 piece of paper. Create each letter following the alphabetical order and decorate the child’s bedroom or playroom with these letters. The art your child creates will mean so much more to him than any store bought alphabet poster.

Magnetic letters

Place five magnet letters on a cookie sheet and tell your child the letter you would like for her to find. Be sure to alternate turns when your child has mastered all letters.

Rice printing

Spread out a thin layer of uncooked rice on a cookie sheet. Choose a letter with your child and ask him to draw it in the rice. Repeat this with other letters. This will give a child who enjoys sensory learning another way to internalize letters.

How Your Childhood Toys Influence Your Adult Attitudes and Emotions

You can probably remember your favorite toy when you were a child. It’ll be the one you took with you everywhere you went and had a hissy fit about whenever you couldn’t find it. Maybe without even knowing it, you probably had a type of toy that you played with most, be it balls or building block or perhaps it was toy cooking apparatus. These choices may have affected you more than you realise, as new research from the London Psychology Institute suggests we are strongly influenced in later life by our childhood toys. Lets take a better look at the main 3 findings from the study.

1. Those children who were encouraged to play with educational toys did not become more intelligent, but were more analytical in their approach to problems in later life. The research showed that learning toys promoted patience and taught people to break down a problem into its simplest parts in order to overcome tasks

2. Those children who played mostly with toys such as dolls or action men etc (toys that had human characteristics) displayed greater communication abilities and could interact better with those around them as adults. I has been suggested that any object that vaguely replicates a human encourages children to communicate with it and share any musings that they have with it.

3. Probably the most interesting finding from the research was that children who always had access to toys wherever they were, not only had more confidence in later life but had better earnings. This means if children played with bath toys, took toys out and about with them and had access to toys at friends houses etc, they became more successful in later life.

There is of course the argument of unknown cause and effect which could undermine this research potentially. For example, did the boy become more analytical by playing with his puzzle, or did he choose the puzzle because he was more analytical by nature? Most experts tend to think that its a bit of both, which means that the study still provides some valid findings.