Did you know that babies can see colour as well as adults from around the age of 6 months? They can SEE colours, they learn to MATCH colours, and then they learn to NAME colours. Colour naming takes much longer because colour is not an actual item, but a quality or descriptor of that item. So the item could be a lid, and all the qualities that describe the lid are: hard, round, plastic, blue, small, smooth, etc. When speaking to young children, try to use the descriptive word together with the name of the item, eg: “This is a round lid” or “These are your yellow socks or “This is your big car”. This helps your little one to start to see that different items can have the same qualities eg: her ball, her jersey and the door can all be red. This is a simple posting and matching activity that is suitable for children from 1 to 4 years. They can play with it on their own sometimes, and sometimes you can watch them play and name the colours for them, eg “That is a blue lid. Can you put it in the blue container?”
As much as we love children to read books created by amazing authors and illustrators, you can also create books of your own if you don’t have ready access to lots of commercially produced ones. Using cereal boxes, scrap paper, pictures from magazines and rope made from plastic bread bags, you can create a variety of picture books with different themes, and then make up stories about the animals or people in your books.
Children who have positive experiences with books from birth to five are more likely to become interested and engaged readers.
We celebrated Sthembile’s 10 years of loyal service to Singakwenza today. She was our very first trainer and has been part of the development of our programs throughout the years. Our team spoke about what they valued about her and some of the words used to describe her were “encouraging”, “caring”, “enthusiastic”, “positive”, “fun”, “kind”, and “strong”. We are so proud of what an incredible trainer Sthembile is, and the practitioners and parents she has coached are privileged to have had her teaching them.
They are almost ready! The next 800 Learn@Home activity boxes will start being delivered tomorrow. With many of our little one having missed out on 6 months of creche this year and only returning in February, we decided that another box of fun and learning was needed to keep those brains and bodies engaged. They contain more than 40 different activities, all made from household packaging, so that parents and older siblings can remake anything that gets lost or broken.
Our Occupational Therapist, Robyn, has been doing eye screening with those children who are back at creche, to check if there are any issues that need referral to an optometrist. Once again, our grateful thanks to Wendy from Hilliar & Gray Optometrists for assisting us in sourcing the charts that we use. The older children use the one with the Es in different positions, and the younger ones use the one with the different shapes.
Our little ones are learning about the numeral 2. When we introduce a new concept, we try to use as many of the children’s senses as possible. They hear the number name, they do 2 jumps, 2 claps, 2 wiggles, etc, they count 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 feet, etc before being shown the numeral 2. We cut the numeral out of cereal boxes, and the children first used their finger to trace the shape of the numeral directly on the cardboard. Then they rolled snakes of playdough and made the shape of the numeral. Today they “wrote” the numeral in flour/sand on the table.
