Open the Early Learning Window

Open the Early Learning Window

Learning disabilities are nobody’s fault. Your kids may have their gene pool stacked against them. The problem is, if you wait until those learning disabilities show up in school, you may have missed your window to rewire the brain so that those learning disabilities don’t impede your child’s progress.

I (Kirby) was trained as a Montessori teacher. In my training, I learned that Maria Montessori was the first female doctor in Italy. In her work, she came across individuals with intellectual disabilities. Her theory was that if she worked with these children young enough, and in the right ways, they would be able to pass the tests needed to go to school; they wouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to be educated. She developed systems of breaking tasks down into steps and teaching the steps. Much of my work developing learning games for children is based on Montessori’s principles.

I would never advocate that you sit your small child in a desk and try to do “school” with them. But incorporating delightful learning games target the early skills that become building blocks of later important skills. Children should be learning without having any idea that you are teaching them.

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Rainy Day Art Activities

Rainy Day Art Activities

Bubble Art

Stage 1: When teaching a child to blow through a straw, have them put it in their mouth and hold their hand at the other end so that they can feel the air come through the straw when they blow out (instead of sucking in).

Stage 2: Since children are more accustomed to sucking in than blowing out, use water in a glass to show the difference. Place the straw in the water and have the child blow bubbles in the water to practice blowing out.

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Reading to Your Wiggly Preschooler

You've heard that reading to your children is important for their eventual success in school and in life. But your preschooler just won't sit still to listen to you read!

In order to have success at reading to your little ones, you need to have the right goals for your reading time. For infants, reading is about hearing the intonation of your voice. They aren't going anywhere, and they don't understand the words, so you can read whole sections from your own books if you want.

Once your baby starts getting busy, reading is about vocabulary building. Vocabulary for babies and toddlers is all about nouns. At this age, you should be looking at board books together and naming only one object per page. No adjectives—just "ball," "truck," or "book." They need to understand names of objects before you add colors, shapes, or sizes to those objects. Your toddler will want to turn pages himself—let him. If he wants to turn pages backwards or skip pages, let him. You are not teaching sequence right now, you are just teaching words.

Even with this very simple style of reading, your little one may only last for three pages. It is important not to force him to sit still for more. Instead, try to very gradually stretch his attention span. If you names three objects this time, see if he will pay attention to four next time. Make sure your tone of voice communicates excitement. Sometimes allowing your child to hold a toy or comfort item will encourage him to sit still longer.
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Teach Your Preschooler Colors

Teach Your Preschooler Colors

Colors are one of the first things that parents think about teaching their children. Teaching your preschooler colors can be a lot of fun.

You should wait to introduce colors until your child has a solid vocabulary of nouns. A preschooler's brain is wired to learn the names of objects before learning to describe those objects. Kids have what is called the "language explosion" between 18 and 24 months of age, during which they will be learning lots and lots of nouns. Work with their brains during this time by naming everything, and by not confusing things by adding adjectives.

After about the age of two, your child may be getting ready to learn colors. The best way to kick off this process is by having a "red day." (Really, it can be any color you want.) Pick a color, like red, and focus on it. Have everyone wear red. Pick red foods to eat. Pull out red blocks or red toys. Finger paint with red paint. Put up red streamers and balloons and hang red tissue paper over the window. Get as much red in your day as you can. Every time you see something red, point it out.

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Activities and Classes for Preschoolers

Activities and Classes for Preschoolers

​Structured activities and classes for preschoolers abound these days. Amid the dazzling array of opportunities, how do we know what choices are beneficial for our kids, and how much is too much?

A good rule of thumb for preschoolers is to use their age as a guideline for the number of group activities a week. A two-year-old probably can't handle more than two classes a week (this includes religious services/Sunday school), and a three-year-old shouldn't have more than three a week. It's also important to know your child's personality here. Are they energized by being around people? Do they do better in smaller classes or just doing activities with one other friend? Follow your child's lead.

Art, music, and sports can all be fabulous for preschoolers. The important thing is that they be physically engaging, age appropriate, and focused on experience rather than outcome. Look for activities that provide tactile learning experiences and opportunities to explore and experiment. Choose sports that don't focus on competition, but rather on learning skills, teamwork, and having fun. Swimming is a lifesaving skill to have, and it can be a great physical activity to start early. Gymnastics teaches kids balance and coordination, resulting in fewer injuries.

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How to Make Grocery Shopping a Learning Experience

How to Make Grocery Shopping a Learning Experience

​Grocery shopping with preschoolers isn't easy. We get goal-oriented about shopping and feel frustrated that our kids are slowing us down. But grocery stores offer a wealth of stimuli for a child's brain, and shopping is a great opportunity to help your little one learn and grow. Below are some ways you can engage your child while getting your shopping done.

Name everything. Everything you buy, hold it up and name it. Let your child hold, feel, and smell items. This will help your child's vocabulary explode.

Work on colors. Once your child knows lots of nouns, you can begin to work on colors. Hold up a banana and say, "Yellow. Yellow banana." Do this with anything that has a clear color. Show your child something red, and then say, "Can you find anything red?" Let them name everything they can find that's red. Play "I Spy." Keep in mind that kids under 3 probably won't remember what they picked, so they may say no to everything you guess!

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Build Pre-Writing Skills from Birth Through Preschool

Build Pre-Writing Skills from Birth Through Preschool

​The ability to write, once a child is old enough, largely depends on the finger and hand strength and the coordination he has developed in his early years. You would think this would happen naturally, but teachers and physical therapists are seeing more and more children whose hands and fingers are not up to the task. Even in third and fourth grade, teachers are sending home notes asking parents to please help their children to do tasks which develop finger strength.

Good news! There are many fun activities from infancy on that you can do with your child to prepare him for success in this important area of life.

Tummy Time

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Teaching Your Child Early Writing Skills

Teaching Your Child Early Writing Skills

​"One of the best predictors of whether a child will function competently in school and go on to contribute actively in our increasingly literate society is the level to which the child progresses in reading and writing. Although reading and writing abilities continue to develop throughout the lifespan, the early childhood years—from birth through age eight—are the most important period for literacy development." -- The International Reading Association

As you can see from the above quote, writing skills are crucial for ensuring success in school and life. The good news is that activities that teach writing are things that kids love to do!

The first step to learning to write is strengthening finger and hand muscles. For ideas on how to do this, see this post.

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What do I do with a Sandbox?

What do I do with a Sandbox?

​When my oldest daughter was 15 months old, her dad built a sandbox. I (Kirby) knew it was going to be perfect! I could hang clothes out to dry while my toddler blissfully discovered pouring and measuring and building and dumping. Montessori had come to my house!

I gathered up my basket of wet clothes, led my little girl over to the new sandbox, and headed for the clothesline. But she just stood there, staring at the sand and looking puzzled. Then it hit me—she didn't know how to play with sand. So I abandoned my laundry and we spent time making mountains together and filling up her dump truck, pouring water onto the sand, and digging holes. After that, she knew what to do, and she knew how much fun it could be.

It's not just kids who haven't learned how to play with sand. Lots of parents don't know what to do with a sandbox either. So here's a list of activities you can do with your pre-schooler in the sand. All of these games build cognitive and physical skills too.

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How to Help your Preschooler Deal with Irrational Fears

How to Help your Preschooler Deal with Irrational Fears

Three-year-old Jonathan would not go anywhere without wearing a hat. He called it his "helmet." One day, Kirby and Jonathan were out walking in the woods, and Jonathan realized that he had forgotten his helmet. He started to get panicky. Kirby quickly offered him the knit hat she was wearing because of the cold, and he calmed down.

After a while, Kirby asked him, "How do you like wearing my helmet?"

Jonathan replied, "I like it. It keeps me from falling down."

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Getting Preschoolers to Cooperate: A Tiny Change for Big Results

Getting Preschoolers to Cooperate: A Tiny Change for Big Results

Do you have trouble getting your preschooler to cooperate? (That was a joke…of course you do—they're preschoolers!)

One simple change you can make--without much effort, without discussing parenting philosophy with your spouse, without brainstorming rewards or meting out punishments— can make a significant change in how cooperative your preschooler becomes.

And don't tell, but it will probably work on the adults in your life, too.

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How To Get The Brain Wired For Math

If a child is not understand math, you can play games to get the brain ready for math. If you need to start over with the basics again with an older child, just be aware of using materials that won’t belittle a child (sand, clay). The object is to get the information into the brain through auditory, tactile, and other methods. If the “highways” aren’t working, use “back roads”- it still gets you there!

Three Principles for Getting the Brain Ready for Math

  1. Stable Order Principle – When you’re counting, the numbers have to be said in a fixed order: “One, two, three, four, etc.” Not “Three, five, two, seven…” Preschoolers often don’t have this concept yet.
  2. One-to-One Correspondence – Each item you’re counting gets a number and only one number. You can practice this when going up stairs. Children may at first use many numbers per step. Have them step on one step when saying each number.
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Finding Focus: Ways to Increase Attention Span

Finding Focus: Ways to Increase Attention Span

The development of the ability for delayed gratification can be done from an early age. Increasing one's attention span will eventually affect many aspects of life from saving money to controlling a temper or facing temptation to do the wrong thing. It is important to start at the beginning.

The fact is the younger the age, the shorter the attention span. Infants have needs that should be met immediately. They need to know that their needs will be taken care of and this is exactly where they should be at developmentally. Toddlers have enough ability to wait with distraction or accept help to accomplish the thing for which they're waiting. Preschoolers can be stretched to increase their ability to wait with some help.

If you're curious where your child's attention span is at, try this little test... Place a raisin or M&M under a cup making sure your child sees what you're doing. Then explain that they can pick up the cup and eat it AFTER you ring the bell. (You can do this with lunch food or anything you approve of but keep it small so they don't fill up too quickly.) For the first ringing of the bell, ring right away. On the second attempt, ring the bell after a few seconds' delay. With each subsequent ringing, lengthen the time by a little longer each turn to try to stretch them. Some children will be able to wait and some won't. If they cannot wait for the bell, still watch the clock and ring the bell anyway as they will have to wait for it on the next round. Don't get upset. This is just an area to work on. Sidenote: don't play this when they're really hungry but when they still want a little food, like at snack time.

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I Can Do It: Preschoolers and the Drive for Autonomy

I Can Do It: Preschoolers and the Drive for Autonomy

One of the main tasks of the toddler and preschool years is developing autonomy. This can be a great inconvenience to parents, who know that, for example, getting out the door would happen much faster if three-year-old Trevor didn't insist on dressing himself when he can\'t do the buttons, tying his own shoes when he doesn't know how, or struggling into his jacket without help…backwards.

One of your jobs, as a parent, is to facilitate the emerging autonomy of your children. This doesn't mean suddenly abandoning your child to the mercy of his shoelaces, but it does mean supporting your child\'s drive to learn to do things himself.

You can survive your child's growing autonomy by:

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Dealing with Change

Dealing with Change

Children tend to not handle change well. Their brain has trouble shifting gears, similar to a railway car in need of assistance to shift tracks. Some children are better with change than others. This is based on personality or temperament. But regardless of their personality or temperament, there are ways we can help our children learn to deal with life’s inevitable challenges that come with change.

  •       They need routines.

If you can have a fairly stable routine (e.g. “This is what we do at this time of day…”), children tend to relax and exhale at the thought of knowing what is coming next.

  •       They need rules/expectations that are consistent, that they can count on.

Children need to know what is expected of them and that it is not going to change. If you make a rule, try your best to stick with it. Yes, new rules will happen at different ages and these can be discussed ahead of time if there is a change coming. When this is appropriate, it is helpful to stop, get on the child’s level, look them in the eye, and describe the new expectation. Then have them repeat it.

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Freedom To Change: What helps in changing a behavior?

Freedom To Change: What helps in changing a behavior?

Courage to change comes from grace not from shame.

There is a type of guilt that can be healthy. It is there when you learn right from wrong, what is helpful versus what is hurtful. The healthy type of guilt says, “What I chose to do hurt someone. I want to choose to help people, to be kind and loving. I don’t want to hurt people.” This is saying what I DID was wrong. This implies that change is possible, because I can change what I DO.

Shame is different. Shame wounds, drawing energy away from someone. It says, “Who I AM is wrong.” This implies that change is not possible, because if this is who I am as a person, I cannot change that. Shame does not have healing capabilities. It deflates a person like a prick in a balloon, slowly releasing the air from inside it. (For more on this see our previous post here.)

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When Can Your Child Start Pretending?

When Can Your Child Start Pretending?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind – from birth to 6 months

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s what the brain of a baby from birth to six months will be processing when the baby sees something. At around seven months old, the brain and how it develops changes to be able to hold on to an image. So if you hide something from your child, they may briefly look for it. But then they’re on to something else that they can see.

These developmental stages are important to know about when we think about pretending with our kids. To be able to pretend one needs to be able to hold on to a picture or action in the mind.

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Imagination Expanded

Imagination Expanded

If you’ve been following our blog posts, you will have seen the last one on the topic of pretending. It was about when pretending might start in your wee ones, why, and some implications to consider. In this post, we’d like to list out some practical ways to increase the development of your child’s imagination. We will give concrete ideas and ways to play together.

First, though, a reminder: when your wee ones start to develop imagination, be aware that little brains work differently than adult brains. (Children are not simply like adults, but small; they are different.) Little minds do not have the experiences, memories, words, or even wiring to imagine what adults find easy to imagine. This one observation has at least two practical implications: One, when helping your child imagine something, it is helpful to engage and develop all of their senses as well as all the words that go with the senses. Two, rather than simply asking the child to imagine something, many times it takes the adult doing something the first time and giving words for it, then interacting with the child in an imaginative state.

One of our jobs is to help our children simply notice the sights, sounds, feelings, etc. that we take for granted. Pointing these out will help develop the various parts of their brain (e.g. the visual cortex). We also help the child interpret what they are seeing and help them to learn the words to describe these things. As they become increasingly aware of the world around, they begin to develop something very helpful in this world: “artist’s eyes”.

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Math for Kids: Seriation

Math for Kids: Seriation

Seriation is putting things in size order, either big-to-small or small-to-big. Children need to learn this concept of looking at something and picking out which item is bigger or smaller. Be sure to go in the same order each time. (Always from bigger to smaller or the other way, but don’t go back and forth. Keep it clear for them.) When teaching seriation, it’s best to use all the same color items. When teaching size or quantity, lots of color can confuse the children as to exactly what you are comparing. If the items being compared are all the same color, the child is clear it is size that is being differentiated.

To prepare for the two steps in teaching seriation, you will need a big square and a little square. You can use a brightly colored cardboard box. (You may be able to get some free from a grocery store.) Cut out a big square and a little square.

The First Step in Teaching Seriation

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Math Principle #2: One-to-One Correspondence

Math Principle #2: One-to-One Correspondence

When teaching the math principle called “one-to-one correspondence”, it is important to involve physical development, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and making it something they delight in – all at the same time! Then they will get it much faster.

Count while Eating

They can count each cheerio, or each green bean. Before they realize it, they are understanding subtraction! It gets the brain wired for math as a toddler. They may not know it, of course; but one day it will click.

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