Playground

It’s one of the best places to have fun with your kid (and a great way for him to meet new friends). To make playtime more exciting, bring toys like a ball, frisbee or bubbles. And the best part is, your child will get to release that restless energy that’s cooped up inside him.

Picnic

Let your kid decide what he wants to eat and get him to help you prepare the food. He can do simple tasks like putting sandwiches into the picnic basket. Also, let him pick a spot to spread the mat. While picnicking, point out different things to him like the tree trunk, birds, insects and so on.

Zoo

An all-time favourite activity and the perfect learning experience! Mimic animal sounds, check out the petting zoo. On the next day, take your child to the library to pick out books that feature his favourite animals.

Outdoor fairs

Let your kids experience rides that are right and safe for his age. This will encourage him to be more extroverted and adventurous as he gets to try out new things. More than that, he will have the time of his life!

Outdoor activities

A great place to get your kid to work out with you is at the park. There’s plenty of space for both of you and the whole family to enjoy activity after activity, like badminton, cycling, jogging, playing Frisbee and running. Or just join any big group who is doing exercises like aerobics line dancing.

It’s only natural to react in such a situation, so what can you do to stay cool and not snap when your kid annoys you? Here are a few examples:

Discipline dilemma

Problem: When you’re in a hurry, you get very angry when your child misbehaves. How can you control your anger?

Solution:

• Calm yourself down by using the 3-step strategy ‘Stop, breathe, chill’. Before you snap, tell yourself “Stop!”.
• Next, take a slow, deep breath to calm yourself down.
• After that, explain to your child that you’re upset and need to cool down. Drink a cup of water and look at the sky for about 20 seconds.
• When you’re calm, go back and explain to your child that you got mad because he refused to listen to you or has done something wrong.

Phone frenzy

Problem: Your child won’t stop asking you for things when you’re on the phone. How can you make him understand that you’re busy?

Solution:

• When your child interrupts, say “Excuse me” to the person you’re talking to (so that you show your child how you’d like him to behave).
• Then explain to your child that you’re talking to someone on the phone and you’ll catch up with him in 5 minutes. Give him a hug – it can help.
• If your child still misbehaves, end the call and attend to him quickly, without yelling.

Hearing

Problem:

It seems the busier you are, the more you have to repeat yourself to get your child to listen. How can you get him to pay attention?

Solution:

• Your child is probably doing this because he knows you’re too distracted to follow up on your requests.
• Let him know that you mean what you say by acting after the first warning that you made. Don’t repeat yourself because he will think that this means he can stall you.
• Make sure however, that your instructions are clear so as to not confuse him of what you want him to do. For example, tell your child to put his toys in the cupboard instead of just telling him to clean his room.

Remember: Whenever your child becomes difficult, explain and tell, don’t yell.

Discover with your child through smell

Playing games is an interesting way to help your child develop his sense of smell. Here are some tips:

• Fill some jars with different items such as lemons, cotton balls soaked in vinegar and flower petals. Then get your child to close his eyes and ask him to guess the items he is smelling.
• Take your child for a walk around the house and help him identify the different smells in the garden. This will help your child become more aware of his surroundings.
• Get your child to compare different smells. Hold a piece of lemon under his nose and then give him a slice of pineapple. This will help your child develop his sense of difference besides his sense of smell.

More than just the sense of smell

As you help your child to develop his sense of smell, you’re also helping him develop in other important areas, such as literacy, listening, language, cognitive and motor skills. Note: If your child has a reduced sense of smell, it could be an indication that he has a cold or suffering from mild zinc deficiency.

Howard Gardner in the 1980’s developed the concept of multiple intelligences, which is the idea that human beings need to absorb and process many different types of information. Gardner defined 7 intelligences which are as follows:

• Linguistic Intelligence
• Musical Intelligence
• Logical-mathematical Intelligence
• Spatial Intelligence
• Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence
• Intrapersonal Intelligence
• Interpersonal Intelligence

To ensure that our child develops in a balanced and holistic manner, parents should provide opportunities for the child to grow in each of these 7 intelligences.

Linguistic intelligence refers to the ability to use language to communicate ideas in either a written or a verbal form. People with a high level of linguistic intelligence are often good speakers, or writers and are people who appreciate literature.

We can encourage our children to develop linguistic intelligence by reading to them from an early age, exposing them to different languages and to a variety of books from fiction to non-fiction.

It is also important to encourage our children to speak and communicate ideas and feelings. Take time to ask your child about their daily experiences, their ideas, their favorite TV shows and cartoon characters, their favorite toys, their best friends. Language ability improves with use.

Musical Intelligence refers to the ability to process and apply musical information. People with a high level of musical intelligence have a deep appreciation of music and also master musical instruments quickly.

We can encourage our children to develop their musical intelligence by exposing them to music from an early age. Some psychologists have argued that playing music, in particular classical and traditional music, to an infant, helps train their brains to process, organize and discriminate between the different tones, sounds and rhythms.

Most children by the age of 2 will also enjoy sing-a-long sessions with their parents. We can begin by teaching them simple traditional songs and rhymes.

Parents can also encourage their children to learn a musical instrument, the piano being the most popular. It is important, though, that the child is interested and that the lessons are not forced upon the child. Parents can nurture interest in this area by bringing the child to watch concerts or music recitals which may inspire them.

Logical-mathematical Intelligence refers to the ability to process and analyze abstract information systematically and numerically. People who have a high level of logical-mathematical intelligence tend to be strong in subjects like science and mathematics in school.

Parents can start getting their children to develop their mathematical skills by teaching them to apply mathematics in their day to day routine. Counting, adding and subtracting can be made part of their playing activities or a trip to the supermarket.

To encourage their skills in science, we can encourage our children to be observant of the natural world. In our own gardens, or the nearest forest park, our child can be exposed to a variety of observations, from how plants grow to how animals behave to how gravity works.

Spatial intelligence refers to the ability to process information about how objects are located in space in relation to one another.

A chess player, for example, has a high level of spatial intelligence, as they are able to analyze how the different chess pieces on the board positioned against each other. Artists and interior designers, who are able to use their imagination to form creative ideas on how to use space, also have high spatial intelligence.

Parents can help their children develop spatial intelligence by encouraging their children to play board games, starting with simple games like checkers, othello (reversi) and Chinese checkers, and then progressing to more complicated games like Chess and Chinese Chess.

Parents can also encourage spatial intelligence by encouraging children to use their imagination in drawing and painting.

Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence refers to the ability to coordinate our physical movements. Dancers and athletes often have high levels of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

Parents can provide opportunities for their children to develop bodily-kinesthetic intelligence by ensuring that they have enough time to play in wide spaces where they can run and climb. One hour everyday at the local playground will certainly help a child develop their bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as they learn to process information about how their bodies move and stretch.

Many young children enjoy dancing. It is a natural activity that reflects their joy and youthful energy, and is also an effective way to develop their bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

By the time they are 4 to 5 years old, parents can also start exposing their children to sports that involve very simple and basic actions like football and basketball. A little later on, children can also be encouraged to try their hand at sports that require more complex and fine coordination like badminton, table tennis. It is important that parents resists the temptation to be too competitive and push their children too hard and such a young age.

Intrapersonal intelligence refers to the ability to process information about how we feel and think. This includes being sensitive to our emotions and being able to understand and manage these emotions.

We can help our children to develop strong intrapersonal intelligence by encouraging them to share about their feelings. Asking questions like “how do you feel about this?” and “why do you feel this way?” help children identify their feelings.

It is also helpful to model healthy ways of expressing emotions and thoughts. As parents, we set the example on how to manage potentially destructive emotions like anger and stress.

Interpersonal intelligence refers to the ability to process information about how other people are feeling and thinking. This form of intelligence is important in helping us relate and communicate with others. It is also crucial for helping young children make friends and socialize with their peer groups. We can help our children develop interpersonal intelligence by drawing their attention to other people’s needs and feelings. Even when we are watching a TV show, we can ask our child questions like “how do you think this person feeling?” “why are they feeling this way?”

From a young age children can be taught to be considerate to others around them. Parents can constantly draw the child’s attention to how their own actions have an impact on how other people feel. This could be positive, like how someone may feel happy when we help them, or negative, like how someone may feel sad when we are unkind to them.

Many parents share the same concern about the struggles they face in teaching their children due to their children’s limited attention spans. Some children would lose interest in their reading and writing work after only 10 minutes. Some could not sit still to listen to a story for more than 5 minutes, but at the same time, they could spend many hours silently watching cartoons on television.

Dr Goh, a Cognitive Development Psychologist said that it is normal for a young child, aged 2-6 to have limited attention spans. Most young children, by nature, are extremely energetic and active, always on the lookout out for new and exciting experiences. These high levels of energy are a good thing, as they enable learning, but they can also mean that the child may get bored quickly if a learning activity is not engaging or interesting.

The following are some things we as parents can do to help keep our children’s attention when they are learning:

The Right Time
Firstly choose a time when the child is most alert and ready to absorb information. Most children are the most alert in the morning from about 9:00am to 11:00am, in the late afternoon after 5:00pm and at night. Of course, each individual child has unique rhythms and parents should be observant about when your child is most awake and active.

The key principle here is not to try to teach your child something new and challenging when they are tired and drowsy.

Short and Sweet
Secondly, make the learning activities short and sweet. For children below 5 years old, each session should not last more than 30 minutes and for children who are 5-6 years old it should not last more than 40 minutes.

Parents should be particularly mindful of the length of sessions when difficult tasks are involved. For example when a child is learning to write for the first time, or when a child is learning to read the alphabet for the first time, we must appreciate that there is a lot of mental effort required to absorb this new information. As such, a short and more intense learning session would be more effective than a long drawn session that will eventually tire the child.

Some parents argue that young children should be trained to stretch their attention to prepare for school sessions that last 4 to 5 hours. We must bear in mind though, that school sessions are also divided into 40 minute periods; which means that children are not learning the same subject for more than 40 minutes.

However, we can and should train our young children to gradually extend their attention spans. We can start with very short learning sessions (of less than 20 minutes) for our 2-3 year olds and slowly extend this as they grow older.

Engage, Engage, Engage
Thirdly, make the lessons interactive. The key to securing our children’s attention is to engage them and make them interested in what they are doing. The best way to get children interested is to make them active learners rather than passive learners.

A child should learn by doing (active learning), rather than just by listening (passive learning). A good lesson will involve talking, listening, drawing, making things and lots of moving around.

Most bookshops have excellent learning activity books that parents can use for their home lessons. These books are divided into individual sessions and each session comprises of many learning activities from writing to coloring to story telling and even acting.

When learning becomes active and fun, we no longer need to fight to keep our child’s attention. Their attention will automatically be drawn to

Limit Television
Many developmental psychologists are discouraging parents from letting children below 3 years old watch television. The debate is still brewing, with some educationist saying that television helps expose children to lots of information and language in a short time and other educationist arguing that it encourages mindless passivity among children.

What I would suggest is that parents should limit the amount of television time for children below 6 years old, to no more than 90 minutes a day. To some extent television does encourage a more passive learning style and makes it difficult for teachers and parents to compete.

Reading of course is a key component in the process of education. A child who reads is a child who learns. Reading opens up a whole new world to the child.

Yet the challenge many parents face today is that very few children develop the love or interest in reading. In the age of 24 hour cartoon channels and computer games, reading has taken a backseat in many homes.

The following are some tips for how parents can encourage a love of reading among their children.

1. Start reading to your child at an Early Age

From the time the child is born, they can already process language sounds and they can certainly get excited by colorful pictures. Parents can start reading to their children from a very young age.

Start reading to your children while they are still infants. Research indicates that even a 6 month old child starts to recognize and process language sounds and by 8 months starts to understand the meaning of words.

Reading also exposes your child to a whole new world of information. My advise is to read at least 4-5 books per day to a 1 year old child, and at least 7-8 books a day to a 2 to 4 year old child and for 5 yrs and above, at least 10 books a day.

It is important to pick children’s books that have well illustrated pictures.

Read a variety of books, from stories, to geography books, to science books. Remember, reading is a form of travel; you are taking your child on an exciting journey to faraway lands, to explore new sights and experiences; for that is ultimately what learning is; an journey of exploration.

2. Read by Example

It is hard to encourage our children to read unless they see us setting a good example. It’s hard of course, given how busy we are nowadays, but with the discipline and time management we can be a model to our children.

As parents we should make it a point to read a new book every month. Start by choosing something you’re interested in; it could be a novel, or a book about politics or history, or a book about travel, or even something practical like a book about gardening or cooking. The key thing is to regain a love for reading ourselves.

This doesn’t necessarily mean buying new books. There are libraries in most towns in Malaysia and many second hand bookshops.

We should also make it a point to talk about the books we are reading. At meal times, when we are traveling in the car; these are times to tell our children stories of things we have read to get them excited about reading.

The bottom-line is that before we tell our children to read, we need to make a conscience effort to begin reading ourselves. Interest cannot be forced but it can be infectious. For some of us this is a huge challenge given our busy schedules. However, when we regain our discipline and enjoyment for reading, we will find that inevitably we have helped create a reading culture in our homes.

3. Make Reading a Family Activity

In line with making reading a family culture, parents can take children to the library or to a bookshop once a month. The idea would be that each member of the family can choose a new book to read.

There have been some excellent bookshops that have opened in Kuala Lumpur and other major towns around the country, including some really good children’s book stores. These bookshops typically have well decorated and well resourced children’s book sections along with reading areas for children. Just the sight of seeing other children reading and enjoying books is inspiration for the child.

It is also a good practice for each family member to share what they have read with one another. Getting your child to talk about the stories they have read is a good way to help them process the information they have absorbed. It also improves their communication skills.

Reading is a key skill that enables education and learning. If we want our children to be highly educated individuals, we should create a reading culture in our family that will inspire them to develop a love of reading.

Tip 1: Widening Their Horizons

Your role is to expose your children to the world of information. We live in an amazing world, full of language, colors, ideas and experiences. Your job is to open their eyes to what is out there.

You can start when your child is still young by reading to them. Whether they be stories or books about geography and science, books expose our children to new worlds.

Taking them to places like the zoo, the aquarium, the museum, the park and lake gardens, a concert hall, or even the local store, gives them opportunities to learn new things. It is important that you do not keep them trapped in the house the whole day.

Tip 2: Child Initiated Learning

It is important for to let your children initiate the learning process, begin with what they are interested in.

If your children are interested in animals, then read them books about animals and take them on the trip to the zoo. If they are interested in planes, then take them to the airport to see the planes.

You will find that your child at age 3 to 4 years old will ask you many questions; like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why do cars need petrol?”

These questions indicate that they are hungry for knowledge and you should encourage them to ask these questions by listening to them when they ask, and making a serious attempt to answer them. When you respect our child’s questions by responding to them, you send them the message that their learning is important to you.

Tip 3: Encouragement and Praise

You can help your children by praising their efforts to learn and always encouraging them, even when they make mistakes.

Sometimes as a parent you can be too competitive and you may focus too much on results rather than progress. You need to realize that young children learn at different speeds and each of them has his or her own unique strengths.

Learning is about discovery, and discovery is about trying something new. This is not easy. Trying something new involves taking risks – that is why when you child tries something new like reading or writing, his courage should be rewarded, not punished.

Loving encouragement creates a happy and healthy learning environment that will help your child attain their potential.

Each time you hug your child, or stroke her hair as she sleeps peacefully, or even look at her photo in your purse or on your computer, something magical stirs in your heart. You hope and pray that she will grow up to be a healthy and happy person and have the brightest possible future.

As loving parents, we also notice that the society is getting more competitive. And realise the need to equip our kids with a better foundation in life so that they’ll have a better life and successful careers in adulthood.

You willingly put their needs ahead of your own so that your kids can have the best that you can afford. This is why you try to put them in the best kindergartens or schools and send them to different extra-curricular activities or classes, with the kind intention to develop them to their full potential. Yet at the same time, you worry if they can cope with all the information that they are exposed to as there is so much for these little kids to learn. Is there a way you could help?

Studies show that children learn by absorbing information and processing all that they have absorbed. Information is absorbed in many ways – kids see, hear, touch, taste and smell their surroundings, and they also observe and interact with other people. The information absorbed will be processed and becomes “learned knowledge”. Therefore, how effectively a kid learns depends on his or her ability to absorb and process information. The more and faster the information is absorbed and processed, the more effective the learning will be.

Between the ages of 1 to 6, children naturally have the intellectual curiosity and the desire to learn. What parents need to do is just to help them to make the learning process more effective. There are many ways parents can help. As most parents are aware, nutrition is one of the key factors that play an important role in children’s growth and development. The right nutrition at the specific ratio appropriate for their age will help in faster absorption and processing of information for more effective learning.

Recognising this important factor, ensure that your kids are given food or milk enriched with Tyrosine and Tryptophan. Both Tyrosine and Tryptophan are important amino acids which are precursors to neurotransmitters in the brain1,2. Tyrosine supports mental alertness and information absorption3 while Tryptophan supports information processing4.

Besides these two nutrients, DHA, AA, SA, Taurine, Choline and Iodine also helps to support the overall mental and physical growth of your child.