I am taking a break from my wedding supplier reviews because I was inspired to hit the keyboards to share my newest experience with my two-year-old boy.
Thankful is the best word that can describe my feeling for the well-established early-childhood programs available here in Sydney. From playgroups, to early childhood classes (like my son's Gymbaroo and Kindermusik classes), to sports lessons for little ones, all of them are easily available for parents. Some require us to pay but there are some resources for parents that are available as well free of charge.
I chanced upon these early childhood literacy and numeracy cards. These cards were sent by the government to big families. It is an aid for stay-home mums in teaching some of the early skills to their children needed when they already have to go to the big school. I only have one kid but I thought of e-mailing the department to see if I can have one as well. I think it is a very useful tool to parents like me. After a few days I got a response, after some exchanges of emails and within one week, I had with me a complete package (cds, manuals and the cards), all for free.
On one of the literacy cards, it was mentioned that parents can aready teach their kids early on the skill of grouping together things. Looking for similarities or differences on the appearance of certain objects, describing them, and then putting them together in their correct groupings. This will teach them to classify things later on. Classification, as what was mentioned, is needed in literacy and numeracy later on.
Sometimes, as parents, we end up looking for the correct teaching aids in shops, especially in the kids sections -- the toys sections. There is really no harm in spending for educational toys. But in my case I didn'thave to spend a single centavo because the tools that I used to teach and later on test my son's classification skills are very much available at home. Yes, at home.
The first time we did this activity, we made use of hangers. I was busy folding some clean clothes and my son was with me in the room. There were three sets of hangers with three different colors. The blue and green ones were smaller than the silver ones. Feeling that it was a teachable moment, I asked him to sit beside me. I started showing him the hangers and described it. Of course he was excited because it was a new "game" he will be playing with mum. I showed him the hangers, gave him an example and told him to do it himself -- to put the hanger mum will give to the correct pile.
At first, he tried to put the blue hanger on top of the green hanger. It was then that I described again the two hangers and asked him if the one he'll be putting is the same as the one on the pile. I think he got the idea and so to make the long story short, he was able to put together the hangers in the correct groupings. Of course, I was there to give him prompts. But after two or three tries, minimal prompts were given. And so, it was play for him. But actually, he was learning from it already.
The second one was just this morning. A friends of ours gave him last night one bag full of old toys. One of which was a bag of color pencils. The color pencils are quite a number and all were scattered on the floor when he started playing with it! Just before packing it away I remembered our hangers activity and tried to do it this time with the color pencils. This time I was able to hit two birds with one stone, having our classification/grouping activity at the same time teaching him about colors. And so, one by one I gave the name of each color, asked him to repeat the name, and when he was ready I started getting one color pencil at a time asking him to put it to the correct group. I think he remembered our hangers activity because he knew what to do already. After 20 or more color pencils, he lost his focus and started coloring again. Of course, I didn't ask him to stop coloring. I think the few minutes we spent grouping the colors was more than enough for the day. We can do it again, on some other time.
These are just two activities that we can do at home with our kids. Simple and easy. It seems like we are just playing with them but we're actually teaching them already. But the important thing here is, we should be there to play with them, to give them prompts, to guide them. Becuase if we all leave it to them, how do we expect them to learn?
Look around your house, I am pretty sure, you'll also find a lot of things you can use to teach your little one. =D
