Anyone who has or expects to have children should read this article about preschool learning as soon as possible.
After emphasising some of the importance and benefits of preschool education, it lists some basic and simple ways in which you can help educate your bairns. As usual with such material, there are 'obvious' things that never occurred to me - like placing a young baby face-down from even one month of age, because he will naturally want to raise his head which will help build up his back muscles which will improve general strength and co-ordination. The paper-crumpling trick is clever too.
Well worth a read!
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What a fab article, but does this mean we should wait until our child is 8 to teach them another language? My computer music leacturer's daughter for instance didnt speak at all until she was almost 5 because her dad spoke to her in portuguese and her mum spoke to her in german, plus I'd say they spoke to her in english too.
ReplyDeleteThat probably wasn't the reason she didn't speak until she was 5 - you'd need more examples to draw conclusions.
ReplyDeleteAnd anyway, Bríd and Tony spoke to us in English and Irish, and put bilingual labels on the furniture and I don't think we started speaking 'late'. I was able to read that kids' book on car mechanics when I was 3 or 4, too!
Also, I'm not totally sure about this "kids up to 8 have a phenomenal learning capacity" statement. They just don't have language skills so spend loads of time learning them. Surely if an adult was a motivated as a baby to pay attention to a foreign language (since you can't watch TV in your own language because you don't speak another one), in a fully-immersed environment, they'd pick it up quickly as well.