Author: fuelingbrains_AdMEEn

You are trying to get your preschool child to sit with a book or board and go through letters and numbers, but they just won’t sit still or gets bored easily. You may purchase sets and sets of build-up alphabets but they rather build and break a tower with it all. Try something different and get your child to learn and revise letters and numbers with some physical activity to burn some energy by turning your street into a classroom!

Teach your child colours by walking down your street and pointing out the cars that pass by. Black sedan, white truck, red convertible….you will find plenty of colours on moving metal. Your child, who will grasp any information presented in a creative manner will soon be able to identify makes of cars too! Turn this into a quiz later by asking them, ‘what colour?’ and give out points for the right answer. Collect enough points and get an ice-cream treat!

An excellent way of teaching letters and numbers to young kids is through license plates. This is a great way simply because license plates are at a great height for young kids. Ask your child to point at and recite the letters and numbers of every parked car that you pass by. If you don’t mind some dirt and dust, let them go over the letters and numbers with their finger. This is a great practise for writing later.

A walk down the street can also teach young children shapes. Wheels are round, windows are rectangles, there are three ovals on Toyota cars, there are four quarters on a BMW and a Mercedes consists of thirds. Children are generally fascinated by cars and since all this information comes to them so creatively, they will remember it all much faster.

So, take a walk down your street and enjoy the lesson.

Happy Parenting!

In this generation where kids are exposed to far more things than we ever were, we see wish lists a mile long and rooms and closets full of things that are not always necessary. We still see these same kids whining for even more things and parents often giving in. Let’s not forget to teach our children how to be grateful. These lessons, taught from an early age will ensure that your children grow up with good groundwork.

Jar of thanks

I have seen this work well for children of all ages. For young preschool children, the Jar of Thanks can start off as a craft activity. Take a large empty spaghetti sauce-sized jar, or an even bigger one and get your pre-schoolers to decorate it with glitter and stars or whatever they like. Explain to them that anytime they experience a moment where they feel something is really special, they can write it down on a strip of paper and put it in the jar. Encourage them to be thankful for something each day. At the end of the month, they can take out all these strips of paper and read them with fond memories. This works well with older kids too; the key is to find something to be grateful for every day.

Act of Kindness Journal

This is a great activity in which children learn kindness and gratitude. Let your child pick out a journal from a bookstore. In this journal, they enter an entry every night about an act of kindness they did. It could be simple acts of kindness by young preschool kids like cleaning the table for mum, helping a younger sibling to clean up, feeding the dog or anything that they are capable of. This acts of kindness work in two ways. They teach children kindness and gratitude for what they have and others may not have. We tried this for a year on 15-year-olds and they came up with great acts of kindness including helping the blind cross the street, washing a neighbour’s car, helping senior citizens with grocery shopping and so on.

Happy Parenting!

Parents often wonder if a daycare is the right answer to child care for their toddlers. Many parents opt for preschool and home as the right combination for their child to spend the day. While it may be a good option to keep your child at home after preschool, this may only be good if you are at home to keep an eye on them. To have your child stay at home with their nannies puts forth many questions of what they will do with their time. Daycare is an excellent option for kids to spend their afternoons in till their parents get them. Besides spending time with professional day care teachers and caregivers, children will also learn a lot based on the curriculum the centre is providing. Here are some other advantages of day care centres.

Health

Although your child may get a few more sniffles than the child who stays at home, being at a day care will make them healthier. Their immune system will become much stronger than other kids and this will protect them from chronic conditions like allergies and asthma. According to a study conducted recently, kids who attended daycare were 30 percent less likely to develop the most common type of childhood leukemia. The reason why may be the immune-system boost from infections.

School Prep

Day care centres are known to be stimulating and cognitively enriching environments.  Young children who spend time in day care centres do better on literacy and number skills exercises. This will help them very much as they enter school. The curriculums day care centres follow are a good preparation or school. A child better prepared for school is a child who will be less nervous and anxious at school.

Social Life

At daycare, your child will interact with many other children of the same age for hours a day. He will make many friends and this is always a good thing. All this will jump-start his social life and he will learn to interact with other people from a young age. Our day care curriculum in Kids U teaches children life lessons in sharing and caring amongst other lessons, which your children will benefit from.

Best of all, you can spend quality time with your child when you get them from day care. Everything has been taken care of by the teachers and care givers at Kids U so you don’t have to worry about homework, studying or any form of teaching when you get home.

Happy Parenting!

You can’t blame children with short attention spans in this era of distractions when adults sometimes have problems keeping it together. Help your children increase their attention span with these tips….

#1 – A conducive environment.

Although many people have different views on this one, I personally think that if an environment is made conducive to work and study, your child will be able to focus better. If you have a TV and an X-Box in your child’s room, he will never be able to focus on his homework. So, create an environment that is free of distractions, get a proper ergonomic chair and a well-lit table, and this can do wonders. If he is in an uncomfortable environment, he will want to break free. If he is in a too comfortable environment, he will want to go to sleep. So, don’t let him work in his bed!

 

#2 – Set Goals

If you tell your child that she has to sit and do writing for an hour, you can expect a rebellion. A child at the tender preschool age will not be able to manage a single task for a long duration. Try putting a single task into bite-sized goals that can be completed in 20-30 minutes depending on your child’s age. When each task brings him closer to a milestone, he will feel a sense of achievement. The five minute breaks in between will help him refresh and rejuvenate him.

 

#3 – Schedule

Depending on the age of your child, sit down at the start of each week and plan a simple schedule together. This way your child will take responsibility to complete the tasks on the schedule and tick them off. Be sure to paste this in a place where he can see it often enough.

Happy Parenting!

 

As parents, we worry about our children’s academic results and also go out of our way to expose them to extra-curricular activities. While we do all this, do we pay enough attention to nurture their emotional development? An emotionally intelligent preschool child is one that knows how to be sensitive to others, responsible, confident and well-grounded……pretty much all the qualities all decent people should have. Here are some emotional skills you can help your young preschool child possess.

Patience

Children and adults who lack patience can be very demanding, short tempered and end up giving up on tasks easily. So, when we teach our preschool children patience, it is helpful in so many different areas of life. A patient child becomes a patient friend, sibling, colleague and partner. It is easier to deal with a happy child because you have given her everything but think of what she will become in 10 years. Delayed gratification comes from patience, and your child will be a better human being with patience with her.

Self-Control

Self-control or restraint is an emotion all children should be taught. We have seen kids who are overexcited and who run around like maniacs screaming and shouting in inappropriate places while their parents try weakly to monitor them. No matter how young children are, they need to be taught the value of restraint. When they learn self-control, they learn how to deal with negative emotions without becoming depressed or behaving inappropriately.

Self-Reliance

This may be a trait that is a bit difficult to teach, especially for parents who are overprotective, but this is one of the most useful things you can teach your preschool child. When a child is self-reliant, she is independent. Through simple acts like feeding themselves, dressing themselves up and cleaning up, you can teach your child how to be self-reliant. When a child is self-reliant, she is empowered to discover life and this makes it exciting for her

Happy Parenting!

Learning how to praise becomes somewhat difficult for parents and educators when we are constantly busy pointing out errors and focusing on mistakes. Most of us have this little problem of not being able to praise others easily, especially our loved ones who deserve it most. A lot of us are not taught from a young age to praise people and actions and we find it difficult to do so. On the other hand, over praising is a big no-no too. You cannot be praising your child every time he does something right or he will get too used to being praised and not valuing it.

Here are a few things to remember when you praise your preschool child:

Authentic: Catch your child doing the right things and grab that opportunity to give out authentic praise.

Specific: The right behavior that is praised often enough is behavior that will be continued. Identify specific traits of your child’s personality that you can acknowledge and praise to ensure that it is always continued.

Immediate: You would not want to be praised for a dinner well-made weeks later when you have forgotten about it. Similarly, praise children’s good habits and deeds immediately and not long after they feel it was ignored and forgotten. This will put you in the habit of praising in a timely manner too. This works especially well with preschool children whose personalities are still being developed.

Clean: Clean praise simply means praising for something done now. It should not be for something in the future and it should never contain the word ‘but’.

Praising a child for the right reasons often enough can be effective for long term good behavior and for a parent and child to bond. If praise is given out correctly, it will never be too much.

Happy Parenting!

From a parent’s point of view, nothing beats getting around with a toddler than a stroller. It is not only safe, it is also a convenient way to get a million things done with a young child with you. Then why do most kids holler and cry bloody murder when you have strapped them into their stroller? This is because of the natural urge of toddlers to want to explore the world around them. Kids want to touch that box of juice, feel that soft fabric of the dress and run down the aisles. A stroller keeps them all away from this and their newly mastered skill, walking and running!

Here is how you can manage to keep your preschool child in a stroller till you can let her free.

* Use the art of distraction. Point out interesting things around you and have conversations with your child to keep her occupied. Teach her the names of things around her as you walk by. If she is engaged, she is less likely to throw a fit.

* Entertain. Sing her favourite nursery rhymes with her as you walk along. Play challenging games like asking her to spot as many flowers as she can or as many dogs on the street as she can.

* Keep aside some books and toys that are for stroller time only. She can keep herself busy with these while in the stroller. Be sure to always praise her when she behaves in the stroller.

* When it is safe, let her out for a few minutes so she can walk about a little. She won’t complain then when it is time to get into the stroller again.

Don’t let her out of the stroller if she starts kicking up a fuss (unless she is hurting herself). This way, she will learn that crying and shouting is not going to get her out of the stroller.

Happy Parenting!

Children all over the world are facing problems with their weight. Kids as young as preschool age are overweight today and it is a cause of concern. Pediatricians believe that if the problem is not dealt with at an early age, these children will turn out to be obese adults with health problems like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Some common reasons for excessive weight gain at such a young age may be poor eating habits, irregular food portions and diets high in sugar and refines carbohydrates, sedentary lifestyles with low levels of physical activity and poor selections of foods when dining out.

As parents, you play a big role in guiding and setting a good example to your preschool children when it comes to eating habits. Young kids almost always eat what is prepared for them, so you should always be mindful of what you are serving to them and what you are eating yourself.

Here are some things you can do to inculcate good eating habits:

1. Take your children with you when you go grocery shopping. Point out types of foods that are healthy. Discuss with your children why those foods are healthy. Similarly, talk about food items that are not so good for health and the reasons. Let your child choose five healthy foods and let him indulge in a small portion of not-so-healthy food as a treat. The reason for this is that you don’t want your preschooler to go to a friend’s house and only target the unhealthy foods since he is not getting any at home. Keep away from sweetened drinks, substituting them with fruit juices.

2. Make a menu for school snacks together and stick to it. Include a portion of fruit, carbohydrates and some nuts for proteins and plenty of water.

3. Control the amount of sugar that comes into the house. Sugar has a way of sneaking up on us. Ice-cream, cookies, soft drinks, cordials, cakes, sweets, chocolates and many other foods contain sugar. You should treat your kids to these foods once in a while, but never on a daily basis.

4. Include some physical activity for your child on a daily basis. Set a good example by getting off the couch yourself. Go for a walk, play some badminton, go on the trampoline; anything that involves physical activity. Limit TV and gadget time for yourself and your children.

Happy Parenting!

Many kids worry simply because their minds take them to places where they are not able to go emotionally. They worry about the monsters under their beds, about failing an exam, about homework not handed in correctly, about going to boarding school, about the many things they can understand intellectually but not emotionally.

Children as young as three can get anxious. Parents who describe their kids as impatient, fussy and hard-to-soothe are the kids who are actually anxious. Many other kids who are happy-go-lucky may suddenly become anxious when they are 7 or 8 years old.

How can you tell if your preschool child is a worrier? If he or she constantly talks about his or her worries, you may have an anxious preschooler. I remember my daughter as a preschool child; she would always have loads of ‘what if’s’.

“What if my colouring is not right?”

“What if my teacher says my work is wrong?”

These are typical hypothetical questions your child may ask aloud and begin to worry about. He or she may become irritable too at times like these.

How can you help your anxious child? Here are three helpful strategies:

#1. You should not get caught up in his or her anxiety. Keep yourself out of the loop and stay objective. Support your child and stay calm. When you look calm, your child will be more likely to trust you and calm down. Assure your child that nothing is going to go wrong and that you are always with him or her to face problems. He or she will believe you when you say ot often enough.

#2. Gather your own tools too for when your child starts to worry. Teach your child some simple ways to calm down when faced with a worrying situation. You need these tools too, so that you can deal with the situation calmly.

#3. Track his or her anxiety on a daily basis. Note down his or her anxiety level using a scale of 1 to 10. On a weekly basis, see how all your techniques have helped him or her get better or worse. This way, you know what to do next. You will also know what triggers off the worry bell and how best to deal with it.

Happy Parenting!

Parenting is often confusing – we are thrown in this whole tub of responsibility with little or no training. We try all sorts of methods to get our preschool children to listen to us, to do things the way we want and often we get carried away with the right or wrong methods. Here are a few common scenarios…..

“If you use the bathroom, you can have a chocolate.”

“Thank you for helping me clean up your room. Now we can go to the playground.”

“I will get you your favourite ice-cream now if you promise to sit still at the dentist’s.”

Can you tell the difference between a bribe and a reward?

A bribe is something you offer to your child before a task is completed in order to get him to do what you want him to do. In the examples above, the first and third are bribes. A reward, the second example is something that is offered after the event.

Some parents wonder if it matters whether it is a bribe or reward as long the child co-operates. This really depends on what you are trying to teach him when you offer a bribe or reward. Are you trying to teach him to ask you what is in it for him every time there is a job to be done?

Maybe not. What you do want to teach your child is the gift of co-operation. You want to teach him that when he works hard at completing a task, he will feel satisfied by a job that is done well. You want to teach your preschool child that work comes before play; that responsibility is important. That it is important to consider other people’s needs. Your little toddler may not understand these goals but if you set the pattern from this time, he will understand it once he is old enough.

Happy Parenting!