3 TOOLS FOR EARLY EDUCATION
Teaching and encouraging education in young children can be challenging. There are many distractions that all vie for your child’s attention. For this reason, it’s important to keep your tools exciting, short, and informative. Whether you homeschool, teach, or simply want to encourage your child to learn at home, there are many tools out there to help you. The important thing to consider is which tool is right for your child.
Books
While most teachers already utilize books as a form of children’s learning materials, books can always be used in different ways. If your child is very young or is mentally disabled you can use popup, coloring, or touch and smell books to help you teach things like color, animals, and scents. Books are tools and certain points can be taken from them without reading the entire thing.
Videos
Even though it’s important to keep children from spending too much time in front of the screen, technology has many benefits. Videos can show children things they never would see in their daily life. Things like wild African animals, deep ocean exploration, or the NASA moon landing can all be seen and experienced through video. Videos can be easily shortened and are typically exciting and use simple language, all important things when using videos as an educational tool.
Games
Both physical games and computer games are great resources for children to learn new material. Physical games like tag, Red Rover, and duck-duck-goose, all give children a chance to learn teamwork and personal skills. These skills are just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Computer games allow children to learn computer skills as well as school subjects. Computer games are designed to be entertaining and fast paced. When a learning component is added to the game, children are engaged and usually unaware of the fact that they are learning new things.
Every child learns differently. The best method is to try several different tools in order to encourage your child to learn and explore.
