First ClassMagazine- Articles

Most parents are afforded the responsibility of taking care of educating their children in the early stages of life. The parent will typically teach the children to know right from wrong and spend a surmountable amount of time teaching them the basic principles for using restroom facilities and the cleanliness standards that are associated with such use.

All of these teachings will prepare the child for the day that they enter the public school system. Most children are not allowed in a classroom environment until they are potty trained because the teachers do not have time to teach them social skills. The child will attain a certain level of maturity by going through the potty training process and this maturity level is needed in order for the child to progress on to greater learning responsibilities.

Most parents will make every effort to teach their child the alphabet before they are tasked with learning it in kindergarten. The mind of a child is susceptible to many levels of learning that researchers are only just beginning to understand. A child will be educated during the early stages of life by copying everything that they see. Bad habits are learned in the early stages of life and might take years before they are unlearned in the classroom environment.

There are many useful tools that parents can use to educate their children with during the early stages of life. There are educational programmes on television that allow children to comprehend the concepts of friendship, teamwork and how to build self-esteem and how to respect others feelings and property. There are some children that will learn foreign languages by following the tales of explorers that they see on television everyday.

There are many publicly televised programmes offer a friendly learning environment that allows children to learn letters of the alphabet without being stressed. Over time, these children will be educated enough to recognize which object names are associated with the letters that come across the television screen. Every small achievement that a child attains in the early stages of life will help develop them into a well-rounded individual who is capable of learning more in a classroom environment.

Parents have the option of using computerized games to educate children. Children are receptive to learning through exposure to training gained by day to day activities. Parents can invent games to educate the child while waiting for an appointment or use the physical surroundings to teach the child about science by showing them the sky, stars, and how thick the grass grows after a good rain has fallen.

Developing Maths and Number skills for under fives

Your child's number skills can be developed through stories, songs, games and imaginative play. There are many opportunities to learn about maths through everyday activities, such as measuring ingredients for cooking.
Developing maths skills
Maths is more than just learning how to count. Awareness of measuring and shapes also plays an important part in your child's development.
Counting
Your child may start to recognise numbers at an early age. They will go on to learn how to count, and will use their skills with numbers to solve problems.
To help develop your child's counting skills, you could:
• help your child count items around the home - tins in the cupboards, toys in the toy box or pencils in the drawer
• sing counting songs and nursery rhymes like 'ten green bottles'
• have your child guess the next number as the oven timer counts down to zero
• point out numbers in everyday life: on the front door, birthday cards, or clocks
• ask your child to collect a specified number of objects
• play games like snakes and ladders that involve using a dice
Measuring
Your child naturally learns to use words to compare the things they see, for example, 'bigger' or 'smaller', 'taller' or 'shorter'. They then learn about the tools needed for measuring things - scales for weight, tape measures for length, clocks for time.
To help develop your child's measuring skills, you could:
• practice measuring things in the home with a tape measure, and write down their sizes
• compare the lengths of two objects
• compare objects to see which is heavier
• fill and empty containers
• weigh ingredients for cooking
Learning about shapes
After learning about the names of shapes, your child's next phase of learning is to describe what the different shapes can do and what they are like.
You can encourage your child's interest in shapes by:
• comparing the shapes of the street signs you see on the way to the shops
• looking at everyday objects and finding words to describe their shape
• getting them to find everyday objects which are squares, circles or triangles

Developing reading and writing skills for under fives

Whether you're on the bus, in the shops or at the doctor's, there are countless opportunities to help your child to learn by reading together - and there are fun ways to develop their writing skills too.
Reading together
Reading stories with your child, even if for just 10 minutes a day, will help build important skills, as well as capture your child's interest in books. From their earliest days babies enjoy listening to stories and looking at books.
To make a fun and effective reading routine for your child:
• spend 10 minutes a day reading together, and make it fun by choosing books you both enjoy
• talk about the pictures and characters in the books and make up your own stories
• buy books as presents and join a local library
Learning about letters
Children often learn to read by matching letters with the sounds they remember hearing. To help this learning process, you can try to:
• get your child to spot letters they recognise (like the first letter of their name) in words
• sing nursery rhymes and songs together while pointing to the words in a book
• look at brochures and catalogues together, and point out words printed in bold or with unusual fonts
• play 'I-spy' to show the sounds and letters different words begin with
• play games with sounds, making up silly words that all begin with the same sound (like the first sound in their name)
Developing mark-making and early writing skills
From a young age children enjoy experimenting with making marks and doing their own 'writing' which they will enjoy 'reading' to you. You can also help your child by:
• helping them to make marks on paper with a range of tools such as their fingers, brushes, crayons
• taking part in other activities that enable them to develop their motor skills, such as rolling dough, cutting paper or threading laces
• helping them 'write' labels, birthday cards and invitations