Reading skills in Children

Our children are created naturally to speak words. However, they are not created to read or write. Reading and writing are two of the most important life skills that come by learning, practice and repetition. With intense teaching and consistent practice, our children can easily learn how to read and understand printed words. Almost all children learn to read and write at the age of about six. However, teaching our pre-school children about the value of reading is very critical. When our children know the basics of reading at an early age, they can become better readers when they reach their primary school age.

Poor reading skills and abilities can affect our children's future in a number of ways, while excellent reading skills can ensure unqualified success in whatever the field of activity our children prefer to choose. Reading skills are the important keys for learning. Anything that exposes our children to the basics of language in a meaningful and understanding manner will contribute immensely to their learning of the art of how to read.

Reading words and text in printed form is a latent ability that almost every child possesses. However, to develop and master the art of reading, the role of parents is very critical, as they are first mentors and teachers, who can initiate the actual process of developing the reading habit. Parents may wish to ensure that their children can read, write, spell and pronounce words in a manner that can propel them to the path of definite success. Have a nice day!

Thought for today:

"To get what you've never had, you must do what you've never done." - Anonymous

Curiosity in Children

Children are always very curious! They want to know about everything that happens around them. They want to touch different objects, feel them and learn about their shapes and characteristics. Other children may badly want to know how a car engine works or what makes the car to move on its wheels. There are hundreds of different questions, some of which are very simple, while the others are very difficult. One thing is sure - that all children ask too many questions about things and events that happen around them, every day and throughout the year. A sense of curiosity makes your children ask all these questions.

So, what is curiosity? It is a psychological ability that comes almost automatically to your children. It helps your children solidify ideas, clarify questions, seek answers to all queries and probe them in all possible angles. It also encourages your children differentiate how things and scenarios could be different. Curiosity is a state of mind that helps your children actively explore immediate environment, ask the right type of questions, probe all possibilities and express a sense of deep wonder at those things that are amazing and surprising.

With curiosity, your children can easily find solutions to problems that almost center on such expressions as "why" and "how". Questioning will lead your children to deeper-most levels of knowledge that eventually helps them to create a meaningful equation between different aspects of life. A sense of heightened curiosity will also help your children become better citizens and responsible individuals.

Is it possible to develop a sense of curiosity in your children? Although, curiosity is natural gift that comes automatically to your children, you may still need to nudge or slow-push them to find answers to the most curious questions of life. As a parent, you may also wish to answer their questions with a sense of deep purpose, which is to make them empowered with the ability to find out solutions to critical problems of life.

Curiosity can quench the thirst for acquiring useful and practical knowledge. It is also the pathway to heightened mental and brain development. When your children are curious, they can be the most productive people on the planet. Have a nice day!

Thought for today:
"Winners are losers who got up and gave it one more try." - Dennis DeYoung

Stimulating Brain Power in Children: Simple Things Parents Can Do

Before you want to stimulate your child's brain functions, you will need to know and understand a number of basic activities of brain. Brain is a mysterious organ that can play an important role in your child's success. Structure ad functioning of brain in an optimal manner is a necessity to lead a life of contentment and satisfaction. Your child's brain works based on some core principles that are too important for normal brain development. Some of these are:

1. Your child's brain is in fact an efficient parallel processor of various nerve cells and neurons. It means that your child's brain can perform several functions at the same time.

2. Learning is a life-long process for any human! In fact, learning involves the entire body not just mind alone!

3. Plain information is actually useless while meaning of these bits of information is actually very important.

4. Learning in your child always happens because of challenge and a willingness to learn. Learning may never happen if your child is under severe stress.

5. Brain can store primary information in different forms in different places within the brain. Your child's brain can easily retrieve these stored information bits by using the complex network of nerve cells.

6. Emotions in your child's life can play an important role in streamlining a number of basic functions like attention span, memory and memory recall.

The above-mentioned parameters are necessary, if you want to make your child smart and intelligent. Stimulating your child's brain is a complex process of training and streamlining combining these parameters and inducing them in your child with utmost care. No parameters are exclusive, but they are inclusive and complimentary. You will need to combine all these parameters to develop your child's brain functions.

Shower Love and Affection: Ensure that you shower utmost love and affection on your child. Appreciate them from time to time to spruce up their emotional platform. Ensure that you are setting up a caring, concerned and loving environment within your home. Make sure that you are inducing an encouraging environment in your home.

Result and Outcome:

• Better and quick memory and recall

• Efficient thinking, reasoning and problem solving skills

• Better and proper behavior patterns

• Better learning ability

Regular Breakfast and Nutritious Food: Breakfast is obviously the most important source of nutrients. Skipping breakfast is dangerous to your child's health; in fact, it can lead impaired memory and inferior academic performance. Among other effects of bad nutrition are decreased attention span and learning ability, lapsed concentration levels, reduced body energy levels, less enthusiasm and overall poor brain development. Better nutrition can easily provide a number of benefits; oatmeal is perhaps the best breakfast cereal with its amazing nutritional properties.

Result and Outcome:

• Increased or enhanced ability to learn and understand

• Better comprehension and understanding of issues

• Superior cognitive abilities

• Superior and sharp spatial memory

• Enhanced logical abilities

Enough Sleep: Your children need adequate sleep to get the required amount of rest. Adequate sleep ensures memory enhancement, better performance in subjects like math and arts. Sleepless nights may result in tiredness and lethargy.

Result and Outcome:

• Well controlled emotional management

• Scholarly academic performance

• Superior learning skills

• Absence of behavioral problems

Creative Play: Creative playtime assists your children in learning and mastering a number of core academic skills and abilities that are so important for reading, comprehending writing, phonetics and problem solving. You can allow your children to engage themselves in a number of creative games and activities.

Result and Outcome:

• Quick development of spatial and logical thinking

• Acquisition of important hand to eye coordination

• Better creativity and inquisitiveness

Culture and Arts: Music teaching, extra-curricular activities and painting are three of the most desirable activities that can develop your child's brain. Study of a foreign language is another activity that provides an opportunity to develop cultural relationship.

Result and Outcome:

• Appreciable academic achievement

• Enhanced spatial thinking and reasoning skills

• Enhanced problem solving skills

Brain building in children is a specialized activity that needs lot of preparation and hard work from your side. As a responsible parent, you should allot enough time to educate your children in all aspects of brain development. Available research studies suggest us that we can easily influence our children's brain power, though the care and support we give, the games we play and activities we do with them, the nutrition we provide them and the sum of positive choices we make for them. Never ever, forget the importance of feeding the right type of brain foods like Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds and a range of other foods that help in the increased production of phospholipids, fatty acid molecules that lead to the development of brain's messaging network.

Stimulating Brain Power in Children

Most of our children are smart and intelligent by birth! It is just that, they are not using their natural talents and skills. Most probably, they did not get an opportunity to develop their brain functions in a normal manner. Of late, brain development in small children is gaining immense prominence among educators and parents.

Your children are undergoing a number of mental and physical changes every day. Brain develops at a very rapid rate in short cycles of bursts. These changes are very critical and play an important role in the overall development of brain.

Developing very critical brain functions in your children seem to be far more important than any other activities. As you touch, sing lullabies, hold, hug, rock and sing to your children, you can expect their brain functions to improve in a remarkable manner. These simple actions will help your children develop highly critical network of brain cells, neurons and nerve fibers. How quickly and efficiently these network connections occur can significantly influence the rate of efficiency with which the brain acts and functions.

You should be aware of early brain development in your children. However, it is also important that you should not worry too much about it. What you need to do is to follow very simple methods and guidelines to make your children's brain smarter and efficient. Just remember that your children are actually born smart and intelligent. It is just that they are yet to go through that elusive "brain-nurturing" process. Your children are yet to learn a number of skills, techniques and process in their childhood. As a parent, you can give a boost to those processes. Brain boosting is an intricate process of transforming an already equipped brain into a full-pledged and efficiently working system.

An ability to provide varied experiences and invaluable brain building activities to children is the hallmark of an influential parent. You may wish to work hard to provide these experiences to your child to make them brain smart. All the best!

Thought for today:
"If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last chance !!!

Last chance to join the following batches:

Hyderabad: 8-Mar-2009. Contact 9849076190
Classes over the web: 7-Mar-2009. Contact mahaacharya@gmail.com

Remember: each day lost for your baby is a year lost. Act now !!!!!!!

ISP: Some Experiences

These are few people who attended ISP and implemented the concepts on their children. They saw benefits and immediately shared.

• "On 4th day of her birth we helped her to crawl. Thatday she crawled almost 3 to 4 feets....We are regularly showing the cards to the baby and regularly making her crawl. ...Thanks to all ISP family." Harish Gotur, Hyderabad
• "Sometimes it makes me wonder...Being parents, is Gods way of giving us a chance to become better individuals..catch up on all those that we didn’t learn in our childhood..:)" Lavanya R, Hyderabad
• "The best thing that we've got ISP is a changed mindset and a new way of grooming the child" -- Vaibhav, Hyderabad
• “My newborn baby supports me while shopping!……when her dad was to come and see her first time, she was informed about it. When he came, she opened her eyes, smiled and went back to sleep. ISP concepts has made my parenting experience effortless.” –- Yogita, Hyderabad
• "Yesterday when my cousin came to my place,I didn't do somethin that I usually do...ask Siddharth to sing Slokas coz now I know how it feels when we appear for an exam...instead we played a game on the slokas which Siddharth found interesting n he sang all the slokas so happily n made everyone so proud of him......I could see that spark in his eyes which made my eyes wet..." – Aprpitha, Hyderabad
• After attending the ISP course and implementing all the techniques, we felt very happy the way baby is responding and developing. I am sure my baby is developing beyond my imagination and vision. – Hari, Hyderabad

Understanding Gardner's Multiple Intelligence in Children

"Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings."- Howard Gardner Frames of Mind, 1993.

What type of intelligence do you expect from your child? How do you like him or her to develop his or her intellect and talent? Is it one of those number crunching abilities? Do you want your child to develop a number of verbal and language skills? Do you wish your child to be an extraordinary athlete? In the past, experts defined intelligence as something that can deal effectively with the environment that includes an inherent ability to reason and sole most common problems that occur on a consistent basis. However, there were doubts raised on how one can define and describe intelligence and smartness in people, especially in growing children.

In 1983, Harvard scholar and psychologist, Howard Gardner proposed a new and fresh theory on intelligence in people that contained much more than just simple definitions of intelligence and smartness. According to Howard Gardner, the words multiple intelligence are new and fresh look at identifying, explaining and defining the word ¡°intelligence¡±. A growing child will have a range of abilities and skills that relate to a particular area of activity and performance.

Howard Gardner suggested the following descriptions of the multiple intelligence domains. Instead of having or owning just one type of intelligence, it is claimed that children possess several different intelligences.

Kinesthetic (Body Smart): Your child is body smart! He or she is very versatile in acting, mimicking or even moving from one place to the other. You child may like to make a number of things and enjoy activities like sports, dancing and drama. Your child can learn through the movements of their body structure and he or she may possess very fine motor control of muscle and bones. Your child may be a quick learner as well. Children with this intelligence tend to learn things like swimming, field sports and gymnastics very quickly.

Logical (Number Smart): With this intelligence, your child will have a keen sense of logic and number (arithmetic). You child can easily solve simple problems, or she or he can decipher and decode simple challenges, perform science experiments, participate in complicated board games or even take part in complex problem solving scenarios. Your child is also number smart. He or she may be very good at doing mathematical subject and perform a variety of number activities.

Intrapersonal (Me Smart): With this intelligence, your kid may be very adept at socializing with other people. Your child may be too extrovert by showing a sense of friendliness to others. Your child may like to lead people and support other in the group. He or she may also be very good at communicating others. He or she will know about strengths and weakness and understand the limit at which they can perform a particular activity.

Visual/Spatial (Picture Smart): If your child has this intelligence, he or she may be good at visualizing things and events. Your child may like to draw and paint objects and figures. He or she may also like to design and solve complex pattern related problems. People with this intelligence tend to succeed in areas like visual memory, engineering and construction. Map reading, solving complex maze like problems and finding graphical solutions are the other areas where your child may excel.

Linguistic (Word Smart): With this amazing intelligence, you child could be excellent in written, spoken and composed words. Your child may be an expert in reading, telling stories, talking, writing stories and poems as well as hearing and reading. Your child is always a word smart person.

Interpersonal (People Smart): This type of intelligence signifies that your child could be very adept at working and socializing with his or her peers. Your child may also be a leader who wants to lead his or her friends and peers in the school. Children with this strength are versatile in communicating their mind and opinions with others. Your child can easily mix and gel with others.

Musical (Music Smart): Your child could excel in creating music and evaluating different kinds if sounds. Your child may also like to sig, play, participate in musical events, play musical instruments and compose songs and lyrics. Your child may be music smart with this intelligence.

Naturalistic (Nature Smart): This type of intelligence may make your child like working with living things like animals, pets, plants and other creatures. Your child may also like to be alone with the natural objects and things. This intelligence signifies that your child is nature smart and interested in world of plants, animals and enjoys learning more about them.