As parents, there are many life lessons you strive to teach kids throughout their lives for raising them into confident children. But, it can be really challenging to find the best ways to engage them long enough to ensure these teaching moments can be achieved successfully. Especially when they are really young and cannot comprehend the importance of what is being said, of potentially their language is not developed enough.
In these cases, as parents, you need to think outside of the box. Here are some handy tips to be able to refer back to, to help with moments just like this.
Ways To Capture Your Child’s Attention
Before any teaching can take place, every parent knows the first battle is engaging with their interests. This, of course, can bring its own challenges however if you consider their interests and adapt them you’ll be okay.
Utilize Their Favourite Toy
If your child loves super wings Jerome toy airplane, bring this into the engagement. Perhaps even use the related television program if they have an appropriate episode to support what your teaching.
Using their favorite toy can offer excellent additional teaching moments such as sharing along with capturing their interest straight away and bringing the lesson to life in a fun way. For example, if you are teaching about colors you could engage your child to place the toys into color groups.
Imaginative Play
Imaginative play is a wonderful hands-on approach to learning. There are so many ways you can bring this into your teaching style. It could be through props such as allowing your child to follow your leadership and look after their dolly like you do your baby, allowing your child to learn and practice life skills, in a safe way.
Alternatively, you could put capes on and be superheroes, and teach about courage and how this can be found and used. In instances like this, you can bring it to life by encouraging this newfound braveness to try something new, such as a new food or activity.
Drawing And Painting
Drawing and painting allow your child to learn through a creative outlet. Not only does it support their fine motor skills, along with supporting learning through a sensory manner. If your child is especially young using their senses is really important for learning as it can help with their self-expression in the future.
You may choose to use their type of engagement to help with teaching about emotions as a few examples. You could ask your child to draw faces to reflect basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, or feelings of being angry.
Puzzles
Teaching problem solving is a vital skill that we all use daily. As a parent, you may find that you instinctively try to solve all problems that they may face, but problem-solving is an important skill for all children to learn.
This is where puzzles, jigsaws, shape sorters can help. They engage their brains and allow them to start spatial thinking, logical reasoning, whilst learning new shapes and colors at the same time.