Lessons from books are great, but children learn through play far better than they do in other forms. There are several reasons for this. At the heart of it is their desire to learn. When learning is not so much work but is fun, children are more willing to participate. They want to jump in and have a good time. As a parent, the more that you can teach through play, the more that your child will retain later on. While some skills need to be taught formally, such as math facts and reading, there are still great ways to teach through play.
Children learn through various methods, but often their physical and social world teaches them the most. Even small infants learn this way. Parents can enhance a young child's learning process by giving them a variety of ways to learn through sight, touch, taste, and smell. For infants, play the games that children love, such as peek-a-boo and other interactions that teach cause and effect. It also teaches them how to interact socially with their families.
As children grow older, they still need stimulation. Remember, kids having fun gives them an added incentive to do the activity you want them to. Pretend play is one of the core elements of the development of imagination. Pack up a truck full of great costumes (you can pick these up very inexpensively after Halloween) and encourage both boys and girls to play. What you will find is that many of the role-playing games they play now are direct reflections of the experiences they have had. For example, a child who may be going to daycare for the first time may practice leaving her baby doll at a pretend daycare. The act is helpful, but the conversations they have of telling the doll that "mommy will be back very soon" will help them later deal with their fears of being left. Encourage this type of play.
Child's play through the years changes even more so. During preschool and kindergarten, stories and pictures are the best ways to teach a child. They learn to interact with each other and the outside world. For example, set the stage for a great adventure story. Read them the account during the morning hours. Then, give them a few ideas and let them act out the story in their own way. You can teach many of the fundamentals in this manner, everything from manners to helping those in need.
Other activities to encourage helping children learn through play include:
· Craft projects: they explore their talents and explore texture, dimension, color, and shapes
· Dance: They explore their physical bodies and stay physically fit
· Building with blocks: Everything from wooden blocks to Legos helps children to learn structure, dimension, and balance, and helps them to grow their imagination.
Drawing: Use various types of mediums from paints to pencils to help them to learn numbers, letters, shapes, and much more
These activities can incorporate other skills, too. For example, perhaps an art project can center around a specific letter of the alphabet. Do not be elaborate, but do be dramatic.
Kids having fun is something you definitely want to consider for the long term. For example, children who are nine years old and up need to develop excellent reasoning skills and need to learn to think strategically. They also need to develop good social skills. Great ways for kids to have fun through these lessons can be anything from fun science projects to advanced building sets done in teams and even 3-D puzzles. Encourage computer projects and video games as well. Unbelievably, the video game they love to play is teaching them excellent hand-eye coordination (assuming that the content within it is appropriate.)
How children learn through play is really up to you, their parents. Encouraging them to play, pretend, and learn all go hand in hand. The skills most children learn at these early ages are not just their math facts and their ABCs, but they are the foundations of how to learn, how to interact with other people, and how to explore, reason, and strategize. These items will carry on with them throughout their lives.
Books are a treasure for which there is no measure. Literally, I mean you cannot weigh the value of books in terms of money. They are just too precious. They are a great source of information, whether hardcover or online. Books create a world of their own; a world of knowledge and enlightenment.
From a very young age, children are basically inquisitive by nature. They want to search and look and ask a thousand questions. Their questions are not always foolish, and yet we cannot always satisfy their curiosity. At these times, books are constructive in feeding this curiosity and answering millions of questions.
Remember, it is important that children learn about animals that live in the wild, as much as they know about Tommy the Labrador or Polly the Parrot. Domestic animals are the ones that surround them and are a part of their everyday life. But there are also wild animals that kids need to know about. They need to know the lifestyle and habits of the tiger as well as the crocodile. God has created all things, and they all have their own unique role to play on earth. Children need not be filled with fear or any wrong notions but should be given the facts which will assist them in making the right assumption concerning wild animals.
Books are one of the best methods of introducing animal life to children. They have a lot of colorful pictures, appealing to the senses of kids and they tempt them into wanting to see more and read more. Books have a way of opening up a whole new world to them; a world that they understand and learn to appreciate with time. Rather than acquiring a fear of the wild, it is better they learn to understand how animals live and are a part of their habitat, into which they are born.
Wildlife books have a lot of information on the lifestyle and eating habits of all animals living in the wild, be it elephants, hyenas, tigers, or crocodiles. They cover each and every aspect in detail, like their daily schedules, how they hunt, what they eat, and other things. This helps a child to imagine what the real thing is like, without really being physically present there. Some kids get so fascinated that they actually take such an interest in wildlife, that when they grow up, they choose the study of nature as a career option.
Books play a big role in conditioning a child's thoughts and opinions in a positive manner, towards wild animals. It would be difficult to live our lives, and even more difficult explaining to a child, the positive aspects of the WILD, without a BOOK.
