Holiday Fun with Your Family

Looking for a great activity to share with your kids during this holiday season? How about dusting off those snazzy aprons and stirring up some cheer and warm memories. Cook with your kids and prepare for a wonderful time. Here are some benefits of cooking with your kids:

Allowing your kids to help with the cooking gives them a strong sense of contributing to the family’s well being. Cooking is an important daily activity that provides nourishment to the family. When kids help with this activity they feel important and needed.

Cooking helps sharpen their reading skills and ability to follow directions. Find an easy to follow recipe or modify an existing recipe and read along with your child. Point out new words, phrases and use the opportunity to start a conversation with your child.

Cooking explores creativity and imagination. Don’t be afraid to veer from a recipe. Cooking requires thought and improvisation. Allow your child to think of yummy ingredients to add to a recipe. Let your child’s imagination reign in the kitchen.

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Holiday Cooking with your Kids

The holidays are right around the corner and kids are excited about sweets, parties and ribbon wrapped gifts. Want a great holiday activity with your child that triggers thinking and encourages reading? Try cooking with your kids. Here are some great benefits of cooking with your children.

Cooking helps children learn about food or nutrition. Even if you are making cookies kids can learn a great deal about the benefits of good food. By teaching kids to cook you are instilling a respect for food that will have lasting benefits through adulthood.

Cooking can help children gain self-confidence. Cooking is a task and like any task a successful completion can create boost in esteem and pride. Let your child help with holiday dinners and make them feel great about themselves.

Cooking carves out time to bond with your child. Cooking with your child creates warm memories that they will cherish for many years to come. Pull out those recipes and the aprons and set to work building a wonderful experience for you and your child.

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Great Tips to help a Child Learn to Read

Teaching a child to read and write is not an easy feat. A great way to facilitate fluency is to get kids reading. Here are some tips for teachers and parents to encourage reading.

Tips for Teachers and Parents:

One way to get kids reading is to talk to them. Frequent communication with kids gets them hooked on words. Talking to kids guarantees great language skills.

Read to children. Make sure that you carve out a time each day to read to your kids. Being read to is a pleasure and it will ensure that kids find joy in reading.

Make sure you read books you love and tell your kids how much you love them. If you derive pleasure from a book chances are that a kid will as well.

Marvel over words. Do you have a favorite word? Is there a word you like to use often? Share your favorite words with kids. This will encourage them to become fascinated with language.

Don’t forget the library. Make library dates with your kids. Teach them that books are to be respected and cherished.

Want a great book to share with your child? Try the Fujimini Island Adventure Series to give the timeless gift of reading for your child.

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Teach Your Child Through Imagination

Teaching language arts to young kids is not an easy task. Acclaimed author           John Steinbeck once wrote that “learning to read and write is the hardest and most important task of our lives”. Some scientists and social scientists who have studied the brain and language acquisition have concluded that learning to read and write is an extraordinary activity that is not an entirely ‘natural’ progression for human intelligence even though creativity is. Is it any wonder that teaching a child to read and write is such a difficult job? Teaching reading and writing is rocket science.

One of the best ways to teach a child to read and write is to tap into their imagination. One of the greatest assets human beings have is our power to imagine and create. Children are considerably more flexible when it comes to creating and entering into an alternate world. Remember reading a book as a child and becoming so completely immersed in another world that you lost track of time? Adults can harness this ability of children to aid in language acquisition. The key to encouraging reading, writing and fluency in children is to give them great books that facilitate escapism.

Try the Fujimini Island Adventure Series to give the timeless gift of reading for your child.

Games Help Your Child Learn

Practically every child has played video games or some form of virtual game. These games can take hours to complete, are highly immersive and deeply competitive. They also trigger psychological responses. More mature games allow the player to make life or death decisions. These games can be taxing and addictive. Younger children generally don’t play darker and longer virtual games. But the virtual games for kids can have a similar impact on them. The question is, are kids of any age learning from these virtual games? Games build skills that are critical for learning. Games are best when they are designed to instruct or help kids explore a virtual extension of a theme or book. Games are most instructive when curriculum or reading based. Games can generate interest in certain subjects. Games can also improve language fluency and acquisition.

ONCEKids has several games, including digital coloring sheets, to supplement their Fujimini Island Adventure Series.

Games can be Great for Your Kids

Games have a bad rap. When we think games we tend to think childhood, play and…well, wasting time.

Of course, if we think about chess, Scrabble and immersive, virtual games we realize that games are far from simple and afford skills that directly negate any concept of time wasted.

Advances in game theory have deepened our understanding of game strategy and skill building. Game theory has softened the hard stance position that games ‘are just games’ with little benefit and no learning potential. Chess is one game that stands above all other games in its ability to stimulate learning and thinking. Many game theorists wax poetically about chess. But is chess the only game that triggers thinking in people of all ages? Any game that provides a challenge, whether competitive or learning, is beneficial to kids and adults. Thus, a word search can be a challenge if supplied to someone, particularly a child, who is building language fluency.

ONCEKids has a great word search that supplements the Fujimini Island Adventure Series. Visit the website and explore.

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Coloring Fun for the Family!

Coloring is a wonderful activity for the young and not-so-young. Coloring not only allows children to explore different themes it allows children to be creative. I have heard parents and teachers correct children when they color leaves purple or the sky pink. You shouldn’t stifle a child’s creative flow. If you are really curious why they colored a dog green ask them to explain. You might be surprised at their answers. Maybe the family dog loves hanging out in the bushes and is often covered leaves. Ask a child about their creative choices and you might be stunned by their power of observation.

ONCEKids has several coloring sheets available on their website. The available coloring sheets tap into your child’s creativity by presenting various cultural motifs and tapping into a child’s power of imagination. The books can be bought through the ONCEKids website. You can color the sheets online with a palette of digital colors or print the sheets and color with yours or your child’s favorite crayons.

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