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The brains of children are highly curious and active. While all children possess unique traits that set them apart, all children have an innate ability and drive to learn.
Here are some reliable and psychologically supported activities that you can use to help kids flourish at a young age.
1. Allow them to thrive in a positive emotional environment
When a child is in a loving, stimulating, and supportive environment like the Raising Stars Early Learning Centre, they’ll be in the right frame of mind to absorb adult-led educational activities. Authoritarian education, on the other hand, limits the child’s holistic ability to think for themselves.
A good emotional environment primes the development of a child’s basic cognitive, emotional, and physical skills. This includes stories, songs, arts and crafts, games, rhymes, and dance activities. While exposure to those activities builds up necessary and relevant skills, it’s the interactions with educators, particularly in child-led activities, that can broaden and support a child’s development.
The culture and environment where a child learns matters a lot.
As parents, you need to understand that your kids will be spending and learning a lot about interactions, cultures, moralities and etiquettes from their preschool. This is why you need to ensure that they go to an institution that values and promotes overall personality development. This is going to be the most important building blocks of life for your children.
2. Encourage playtime
Children possess a natural curiosity about the world. As an educator, this intrinsic motivation that children have can be harnessed to your advantage. Find the activity or item that piques their interest, and you can weave that towards your activities to grab their full attention.
Active learning, or learning through play to a deeper extent, involves a child in the process of learning new material. Playtime achieves this, especially if it ticks all the marks in activating and fully harnessing their senses (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile).
Playtime activities can be races, flashcards, competitions, quiz bees, and so on. These support their active learning, while also allowing them to develop social skills they’ll carry with them for the future.
3. Develop their social skills
From as early as the first few years of their life, children developed an acute sense of self and the world around them. This involves two types of development: social and emotional. Social development is how a child will interact with the world around them. Emotional development revolves around expressing and regulating one’s emotions.
Having a strong social-emotional development is paramount to later success in social, emotional, and academic aspects of their life. Meeting these needs would set the groundwork for a child to confidently interact with the world around them. These healthy interactions allow them to form healthy relationships with their parents, teachers, and peers in the future.
If this development is stunted, a child may face the repercussions and have difficulty opening up and communicating with others. As such, it’s crucial to expose children to the right environment as it can affect their temperament and life experiences.
As teachers, you also play a vital role in a child’s home education. You can communicate with parents, encouraging them to:
- Promote a safe space for their children to share feelings
- Give opportunities for playtime with other kids
- Show love and affection to their child
4. Reinforce good behaviour
In the early years, educators reinforce behaviours that are desirable regardless of the cultural underpinnings. This could include things like helping friends, sharing with others, saying sorry and forgiving, teamwork, being polite, and taking turns.
Teacher-led activities can be easily developed to allow children to cooperate and perform desirable activities. For example, a teacher can promote group work where children have to share one item to work with, like a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn’t stop just there, though.
Educators must also continue to promote and encourage these good behaviours by affirming the child’s actions. Additionally, if you support and make your encouragement known to a child in front of their peers, the reinforcement will have a stronger effect.
Moreover, you must also show praise regardless of the outcome. The effort is more important than success, since the aim is to encourage the entire process.
5. Form bonds with parents as well
A great educator doesn’t work in isolation from a child’s parents. They work hand-in-hand to help not just bring the parents in the loop, but also to help provide insights into a child’s behavioural patterns. The same rule applies for parents to teachers as well, providing insights at home and patterns that their child has developed over the period.
More importantly, parents can bring home and reinforce the learnings and themes that are a part of the teacher’s syllabus. This could include finishing and reading a book from school, watching kid-friendly, educational movies, or organising playdates with another child.
Keeping the lines open with face-to-face communication can help bring meaningful information and feedback that benefits the child. This makes the relationship more equitable and prosperous, helping both parties stay updated with the development of the child.
6. Model skills by showing
As a teacher, your non-verbal communication and body language play a crucial part in how a child understands the activities stemming from modelling. Children absorb information like a sponge, and they can learn most effectively when their educator explicitly shows them how things are done. By modelling, an educator promotes the “show, not tell” style of learning, and it can effectively teach young children new skills.
Early Learning Importance
Children are actively learning wherever they are–at home, in early learning programs, and communities. Parents are surely children’s first and most important teachers, but young children need meaningful learning opportunities to develop skills and a foundation for learning throughout life. Children who participate in early learning programs develop a love for learning, and their families benefit too!
