Many of the much publicized teaching methods make children learn like a parrot, without making them do any constructive thinking. A lasting benefit of education can stem only from making the kids learn through thinking and understanding. There are now many websites such as http://www.inspirethinking.com that helps parents to teach their kids through thinking by using toys and tools such as creative books and software. These learning tools stimulate preschoolers to think critically and logically.
Let us see how a child could be taught the alphabets and numbers using some of these techniques. When reading a story from a picture book, make the kid observe the letters in the word and listen how these letters are pronounced. After a number of repetitions of this method, the kid will automatically learn to associate the sound with the letter, and will soon be able to recognize the letter and sound when these are seen elsewhere. This is teaching the kids through phonetic method, unlike by naming the letter method.
Similarly, when teaching the kids numbers, first teach them the numeric values instead of number names. For example, take a book and tell them one book, and then show them two books and say ‘two books’ and so on. They already know the names of these common items, and now will learn to associate the numbers with these things.
The numeric value method of teaching enables the kids to visualize the quantity rather than simply the numeric symbol. In this way, mathematical operations become much easier for the kids. They will soon learn to add the numbers because it makes perfect sense to them to say two and two would make four.
Posted on May 20th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Language Development, Learning, Toddler
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