Teaching the alphabet
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 fun 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 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 for you 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 . 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 fantastic fun for your young learner in the bathtub. Parents can place letters on the side of the bathtub, or wall (if tiled), 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 the letter away and start 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 be much more meaningful to him or her 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 using other letters. This will give your sensory motivated learner another way to internalize letters.
Categories: Babies Tags: alphabet, child development, learning, learning skills, preschool skills, preschoolers, teaching
The Influence of Children’s Toys
Everyone has a toy that they favoured when they were younger. This is usually the one that you took to bed with you or carried with you wherever you went. Most people had a favoured category of toy also, such as planes, army men or dolls. New findings from the London institute of Psychology have shown that they toys we play with when we are younger have a massive impact on us as adults. Below we examine some of the more interesting points the research highlighted.
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 developed patience and taught people to break down a problem into its simplest parts in order to overcome tasks
2. Children that favoured playing with toys that looked like humans (such as dolls), tended to have more advanced interaction skills and could communicate better as an adult. It is thought that by having a face that children could talk to whenever they wanted encouraged them to vocalise their thoughts and share their problems with their toys.
3. Probably the most controversial of the research’s findings was that the adults who accrued the greatest wealth and had most confidence, where those who had access to toys at all times when they were growing up. 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.
An important point to note with this research however is that it is not clear which way round the influencing factors occurred. What is meant by this is do children become influenced by the toys they play with or do they pick certain toys because of the type of people they already are? In reality its probably somewhere in the middle, but nevertheless the research is still quite revealing.
