The main purpose of having open-ended toys is learning. So more toys than not should be able to serve multiple uses and engage them in different ways. But there is a place for the others too. BALANCE.
Read MoreI have a free four-day listening conference. It's one hour of video total, but today I’m going to put in the audio for day one of this listening conference. I feel like every single day has so much value, but I want you to be hooked here first so that you want to get into the conference listen to the rest of the videos and hopefully, it will change your life and help your child learn to listen. So, without further ado I’m going to just plug in the day one of my free listening conference right here into this podcast, so you can listen right now. Access the rest of the listening conference in the show notes, it's free.
Read MoreAlanna: So, I am the founder of a brand called play, learn, and thrive. Well, I’m still a teacher so I’m a public school teacher I’ve been teaching for about 10 years and after I became a mom I sort of saw the issues that I was seeing in public school and realized that I wanted to do something about it. And so, I founded this brand this company to help educate parents and just to give them permission to step back and let their kids play, not push early academics and just kind of allow kids to really have a childhood.
Xo Playtime
Yay, we just finished another play podcast because I love learning through play. A quick reminder that you can join anytime our XO playtime membership where you can access all of my XO playtime learning plans. Each plan is centered around a theme and includes creative arts, reading, and writing, math and engineering, science sensory, dramatic play, social studies which is code for field trips and gross motor play along with some supplemental activities at the end some book ideas and some super fun engaging interactive learning through play activities to create your little problem solvers and engineers.
Go to XOLaurenPace.com/XOplaytime for more information or click the link in my show notes.
Find Alanna here
@playlearnthrivekids (FB, Insta, Pinterest, Twitter)
Read MoreToday we're going to jump in with an episode on, ‘how children learn and what we should value in our children's education’.
ACADEMIC VS. INTELLECTUAL GOALS
So, we're going to talk about two different types of learning and specifically, I’m talking about for under kindergarten age level right now, but this will apply for all age levels. So, there are two different goals in learning that I want to talk to you about. The first is academic and the second is intellectual.
So, academic goals focus on the mastery of facts. So, memorizing the alphabet, practicing drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises that prepare children for the next level of numeracy and learning. So, in older grades, this would be you know, the things that we have to know the facts for to memorize for a test history information that kind of stuff.
Okay intellectual goals, emphasize reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to questions, developing and analyzing ideas, and then trying to understand something.
So, we need both goals when it comes to learning. However, much of the early curriculum in non-accredited programs focus on the academic goals before the intellectual goals. Academic learning will happen without a doubt in kindergarten first grade and second grade, but research argues that preschoolers and toddlers actually will do better academically if they have the executive functioning skills which include self-regulation, organizing and planning, and flexible thinking before those academic goals come.
XO PLAYTIME
check out xo playtime here: xolaurenpace.com/xoplaytime
Read MoreEmpathy is certainly something that we can learn and it's not something that we're born with and it's something that we practice and that we come to live out and it begins with a foundation of strong emotional intelligence as kids.
Empathy is literally being curious and trying to draw out everything from inside a person's mind that is making them feel a certain way and we can start to develop this with kids by working with them to perceive their emotions and understand the context that creates those emotions in themselves and other people. It's my hope that this will lead to stronger friendships, stronger relationships and better performance in life, better social skills, the prevention of mental illness and all the physical, illness and sadness that we're seeing in the world.
My hope is that these things will help to make it better.
If 10 people share their favorite bedtime story and tag @dr.nissen and @xolaurenpace, he will read us a bedtime story on the gram!
Find Dr. Nissen
IG: @Dr.Nissen
Youtube: "Brain Health with Dr. Nissen"
Podcast: "Brain Health with Dr. Nissen"
Today I have a special guest joining us. Dr. Rahat Sayyad. I found her on Instagram and she's from India! She is a physician (Intensivist practicing for 6 years), a mom of two toddlers and she enjoys reading medical journals, listening with podcasts, writing, she can't dance and she hates lizards. I love those fun facts about her.
I get comments all the time from my mom, her friends, my aunts and they always say I wish I would have known this when I was raising kids. I think that's something just like with kids when they know better, they can do better and when WE know better WE can do better.
Let's talk about how we can raise emotionally stable well-adjusted humans by parenting differently than we were parented and I've selected just a few of her eight points that she made in her post to expand on with me. (The rest of this blog is information from Dr. Rahat Sayyad that was spoken on my podcast).
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