Kids and Board Games With Benefits!

Aside from the “soft” benefits like spending time together as friends or family, traditional board games can teach young children such things as hand-eye coordination, visual perception, letter recognition, color recognition and number/shape recognition. Games can also teach children how to “play by the rules,” how to interact with others and ultimately, how to be a good sport.
For young adults, there are many games that are good for building critical thinking skills. For instance, checkers, chess and some card games require serious thought in order to excel. Computer games can be good for strategic thinking, as well.
Here are four games teachers and parents might explore to build financial skills and mental agility...

Kids and Board Games with Benefits:
Life
The latest version of Life takes players through a thought-provoking simulation of a person’s life from high school through retirement, with jobs, marriage, kids and many other big life decisions to be made along the way.
Payday

Games that get kids thinking about life, money and jobs!

Want to teach kids to make their money last? Consider the game of Payday. Using a 31-day calendar for the board, players try to make their monthly pay check last. Just like the ‘real world’, players have the choice of investing, taking out loans or going for a long-shot gamble – none of which provide any guarantees for success.
Monopoly
The best-selling board game in the world, Monopoly helps young people learn the basics of economics. It provides the opportunity to learn fundamental money concepts and the rewards of wise spending decisions.
Careers
Introduced in 1955, the winner of this classic board game is the player who achieves their life goals the soonest. Before the game begins, each player determines whether they want to pursue fame, money, happiness or a combination of all three. Success in achieving their goal depends on the path they take through the game.

What is your favorite game? Why?

Changing a Child's Life

Children are one third of our population and all of our future. 
~Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

Every so often we get to see what the majority of children go though in their own lives. Working in various environments and socioeconomic settings has really opened our eyes to the importance of paying attention to our families as well as young children. Getting the right support and skills needed for a family as well as a child is a forefront for success skills for later in life.

The Ounce of Prevention

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."

~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

 Senator Obama spoke in at the Ounce of Prevention Fund's Spring Luncheon. He acknowledged programs such as these among others for for their innovation and proving at risk children can achieve success. Years later we are seeing that people are truly listening and what we knew to be possible now is coming with a plan.

Early Learning Research on Executive Function

 "If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all." 

~Pearl S. Buck

 Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Heckman spoke at Washington State University about recent early learning research. He is passionate about proving the importance of non-cognitive skills such as soft skills. Trying to track and measure executive functions as well as cognitive functions have been quite a task. Why? Improvements in these in these social-emotional skills show kids do better academically.
In Early Childhood Education, this is something we are all passionate about!

Building Skills in Early Childhood Education

" It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." 

~Frederick Douglass

Fostering a positive environment in the child's home proves to be a great foundation for success.
Nobel laureate, James Heckman, discusses how skills build upon skills, which makes it easier to acquire skills for success in future years.  Improving the workforce of next century starts with us building these soft skills up in our children. Starting at the earliest ages birth to age five has been the main course of study.

Soft Skills Show Hard Effects

 Soft skills and Executive Functioning are some terms that have been thrown around a bit in early childhood research. Really it is about getting kids to socialize and develop in ways where they can be their absolute best. I have always tried to stay on board with what is going on with the latest research and development regarding our children. There is more of an emphasis on this now because of the times we are living in.
Being a well rounded in my own education to me means I how what is going on outside the bubble of my own classroom. As are curriculum it means staying cutting edge and working on getting out kids and families in grounded in the skills they will need for success in life.

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Early Learning and the Brain

 The University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences is an interdisciplinary center conducting innovative research on lifelong learning and the brain.

They test mimicking behaviors in children as forms of learning and actually measure signature brain waves in babies. They are finding that kids learn faster in the first few years life than they time. This decade is proving to be the year of brain research.

success lifestyle

"Success comes in cans, not cant's."
  

Milestones of children's development are wonderful opportunities to cheer them on through life. A baby's first step, their first tooth, and what's even better is when they begin to have an awareness of how their brain works in connection with their body. Although we cannot see the mind like the brain kids are learning how it works as well. How they view their successes, their failures, and how we react to them really shape the mind.

When we teach them that a failure or a mistake is merely a stepping stone in life experience for success we give them a mindset for a success lifestyle.

Taking a chance or trying something new is no longer so scary, but an opportunity to do great things.

Soft Skills in Early Childhood Education

 Soft Skills such as perseverance, attention, motivation, and self-confidence contribute greatly to "success in society at large. Professor James Heckman has confirmed skills such as these are not only predictive in academic success scores but for successful adults as well. Needful life skills such as these have a foundation in quality early childhood programs and healthy families.
"Fixing people" before potholes and other American concerns. We're listening....

Help for Kids With Autism

I learned to work so closely with families through wonderful kids that happen to have this condition. Sometimes communication is not so easy, words and feelings become dammed up and shaken up like a carbonated drink.
I believe we have all experienced this in our lives but unless we can tap into that empathy and compassion it will be difficult to truly relate to how an child with autism feels.
I appreciate the strength and courage of the families and teachers that have worked together to support one another. Let's hope that financial help for families through Health Care laws can start a change for many families.

Investing in People

 Quality early childhood programs not only help develop the next generation but know that the family is a vital part of a child's education. It's nice to know there we are working toward a better brighter future for our families by investing in them. People that understand there are no 'small things', just small things done with great love that will make a difference. Small really is big after all.....

Brain Development and the Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education

“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain

playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean

pool of subconscious from which it rises.” 

~Sigmund Freud

 Expressive art and art experiences, opportunities for music and movement, literacy and pre-literacy are all part of a child’s 'work' or 'play' in early childhood education.

This is all part of early learning and there is a tremendous impact on a child’s brain during the early years.

When a baby is born he has approximately 100,000,000,000 tiny cells that make up his brain. It’s about the same number of stars we have in our Milky Way Galaxy!
By age two his brain is forming faster than it ever will in his entire lifetime…
And by age three he has more cell to cell connections than the average adult!
The more connections your brain can make…the more it can do.
Pretty amazing…
Whatever we do teach our children, I am so glad we care enough to teach them well so this will stay with them for a lifetime....

Cognitive Development in Preschool

Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, 
but he found something in the air from his 
own imagination and his own brain power, 
and look what he did.
~Eartha Kitt

The brain has always fascinated me. I see children struggle with various tasks and parents fret and compare their child to siblings or other children with in the preschool classroom…. Often times within weeks or months they have surpassed their peers and everyone’s expectations with skills they have acquired.

The human brain is working so rapidly at this time that we often for get that a little person is still under construction….foundations are being laid, walls being built, a whole lot of hammering and shaking is going on.
It is such an amazing process and I am so glad to be a part of it. Just like what we feed the body I know it’s important to feed or minds proper information. There are things I can do with the preschoolers to keep the cognitively alert with in the early childhood setting.
*Maintaining a safe happy environment
*Promoting kindness and a sense of community
*Encouraging creativity, questions, and science all around us
*Including the children’s ideas and play in the preschool curriculum.
I like the video because it had so much information…David Elkind was one of my favorite authors. I apologize for the music at the end of the video…um, at least I think it’s music.
It gave me the heebee-geebee’s.

Why do children want to hear that story again?

 “If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.”
-Groucho Markx

Preschoolers and toddlers absolutely love repetition. Children master skills though constant repetition, while we-as adults simply look for the quickest way to do things.
In early childhood education there is a balance with this, of course. Finding more ways to incorporate literate as well as social skills is part of setting up a creative environment in the classroom.

What the children are asking for is to be swept away into a book or a story….this is a love for the written word; literature, books, a foundation for a love of reading, writing, language arts…and not to mention the intricacies of the characters, and a really good plot! Thinking of it that way, it I would hope anyone would think twice before refusing to read or simply read a child a story…..again….and again……