early childhood education — Babylicious by Figur8

Award-Winning ABCmouse.com Program Makes Learning Fun for Children!

October 19, 2011 by Shen-Li 1 Comment

As a stay-at-home-Mom, I find it a challenge to keep ahead of my children’s educational needs. There are days when I hardly sleep at all so I can only imagine what it must be like if I had to work as well. Fortunately for us, we live in an era of technology that makes programs like ABCmouse.com available to us so that parents who are pressed for time can still have the option of enriching their children’s education.

ABCmouse.com is the leading and most comprehensive online early education curriculum for parents, preschools and kindergartens in the United States and Canada. Developed in close collaboration with nationally recognized education experts, ABCmouse.com was recently honored with the prestigious Parents’ Choice Gold Award, the highest level of recognition from the Parents’ Choice Foundation. The award is given to products that are judged to have the highest production standards, universal human values, and a unique, individual quality that pushes the product a notch above others.

The lessons of the Step-by-Step Learning Path consist of hundreds of books, puzzles, games, songs, art activities, and/or printables that relate to a specific topic. Each lesson offers children several different ways to learn, in accordance with the recommendations of early childhood experts.

ABCmouse.com recently won the Mom’s Choice Gold Award, their highest honor, in the Online Resources category. ABCmouse.com‘s music album, The Letter Songs A to Z received its own Mom’s Choice Gold Award for Educational Products & Software. The Letter Songs A to Z features 26 full-length songs that help children learn the names and sounds of the letters of the alphabet.

ABCmouse.com helps prepare a child for academic success and will provide a fun and rewarding experience that will last a lifetime.

To fit everyone’s needs and budget there are three convenient enrollment options:

1. $7.95 per month
2. $79 per year (get 2 months FREE)
3. $99 for two years (this is our best offer with over 45% savings!)

Send your little scholar on a fun and safe learning path at ABCmouse.com.

More about ABC Mouse

Filed Under: Education, Products Tagged With: early childhood education, product

Early Childhood Education: The First Six Years

October 9, 2011 by Shen-Li Leave a Comment

There is an article on Eye on Early Education that talks about the importance of the first 2000 days in the life of a child. The message comes from Dr Patricia Kuhl – whose name should not be unfamiliar since she was the one who told us about the linguistic genius of babies – and Dr Andrew Meltzoff – who was mentioned in Brain Rules for Baby because of his amazing work with babies. The message they bring is a potent one:

“There are only 2,000 days between the newborn baby and when that child will show up in kindergarten. It is urgent that we use the best scientific info to make sure we support all our children so they can succeed in school. Our children can’t wait.”

For parents involved in early childhood education, this is nothing new. We heard it from Maria Montessori:

Every child, by instinct, wants to learn and grow to the limit of his abilities. In the first six years of life he does this by imitating those around him. To support this need we must carefully prepare the physical and social environment, provide tools that enable the child to work to create himself, watch for those first tentative moments of concentration, and get out of the way, following the child as his path unfolds.

We heard it from Glenn Doman:

During the first six years of life, the brain absorbs a tremendous amount of information: three times more than during the entire life. By the age of six, the formation of a human’s brain is almost complete in its development. The information children learn by the age of six will serve as a basis for knowledge and wisdom which will increase during the rest of their life.

And Right Brain Education philosophy emphasises the importance of starting early because of the law of diminishing ability:

Ability to acquire new facts is in inverse proportion to age: a one-year-old child learns more easily than a seven-year old. A fiver year old learns more easily than a six year old, a four year old learns more easily than a five year old, a three year old learns more easily than a four year old, a two year old learns more easily than a three year old, and a one year old learns more easily than a two year old, and learning is easiest of all for babies (below one).

All this is reinforced by the knowledge that a child’s bilingual ability begins to fade after the age of 1.

And to provide our children with the richness in their environment to provide these learning opportunities is easy. Every parent has the capability to do it. It is about reading to our children, playing with them, talking to them, and giving them opportunities in their everyday life for learning.

This is the reason why babies as young as six months are encouraged to attend right brain education classes. Although they are unable to perform the tasks themselves, they are learning by observing their parents performing the tasks. However, since it can be months before a child is able to express what he has learned, we are often unaware of the knowledge that is building up until he is capable of expressing it later. Susan du Plessis refers to this difference as active and passive knowledge. It is similar to how we are often able to understand more of a foreign language than we are able to speak. This unspoken understanding is passive knowledge. Once we are able to speak it, it becomes active knowledge. In order to shift it from passive to active knowledge, sufficient repetition is required.

This is also the reason why it is important who you have caring for your child in those early formative years. They say that parents are the best first teachers for their children. Who could be more invested in a child than the parent? Unfortunately, some parents have to work for various reasons. In such cases, who your child’s primary caregiver is becomes even more important. If you can’t be the one looking after your child, find someone who will talk to you child, sing to your child, play with your child and provide all the necessary interaction to encourage brain development.

Mothers who don’t talk to their babies much raise children who are late talkers. Similarly, caregivers who don’t interact much with the babies they care for will raise children who are slower developers. But most important of all, babies need love to learn.

Filed Under: development, Education Tagged With: child development, early childhood education

Competitive Mind Maps Lend Credence to the Importance of Early Childhood Education

September 14, 2011 by Shen-Li Leave a Comment

This is a brief explanation of neuroplasticity from the work of Michael Merzenich as discussed in Chapter 3 of The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. For a more information, please read the book.

Mind-mapping was a process first performed by Wilder Penfield. Using electrodes, he was able to map out areas of the brain associated with sensory input and motor control of various parts of the body. Unfortunately, this led to the belief that mind maps were fixed and the same in every individual. It was Michael Merzenich that showed this was not the case. Mind maps differed from person to person and even within each individual depending on the experiences they had during the course of their lives.

For each brain system to be developed properly from birth, it needs to receive the proper stimulation. For instance, for the eye to see properly, it needs visual stimulation. If you seal that eye shut, the part of the brain associated with vision in that eye fails to develop and that eye becomes blind. I guess this is similar to ambylopia (lazy eye) when the individual relies only on the good eye and the weak eye worsens over time from “disuse”.

The other thing that was discovered was that there are specific times of development for each brain system where it is most sensitive to its environment. Beyond these periods, its plasticity lessens. For example, the critical period of language development begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. Once this period ends, the ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. Second languages that are learned after the critical period are processed by a part of the brain that is different to the part that processes the native tongue.

Although it has long been accepted that neuroplasticity exists in childhood, it took a while before it was finally accepted that neuroplasticity exists even into adulthood. The interesting thing about neuroplasticity later in life is that it becomes competitive. Everything is fighting for space on the neural cortex of the brain and what eventually gets the greatest representation are the things we focus on. If stimuli activating a certain part of the brain is cut off, the brain real estate is then claimed by other parts. For instance, if one of your fingers was cut off, the part of the brain that represents that finger is then claimed by the other fingers.

Competitive neuroplasticity explains why adults have trouble learning a second language. Although convention states that this difficulty is due to the fact that adults have passed the critical period of language learning, and that the adult brain has become too rigid to change its structure on a large scale, competitive neuroplasticity states otherwise. The older we grow, the more we use our native language and more usage means it takes up more brain real estate, in this case it dominates our linguisitc map space blocking out opportunity for other languages to claim a foot hold. When a child is young, both languages are learned side by side so both are able to claim mind maps of their own. In fact, both languages share a mind map containing a library of sounds from both languages.

Competitive neuroplasticity also explains why bad habits are hard to break. When we establish a habit, it occupies a brain map that could otherwise be used for good habits. The more we repeat the bad habit, the more control it has over the mind map and the harder it becomes to establish a new habit to replace the bad habit. In other words, unlearning is a lot harder than learning and it is this reason that early childhood education is important – we need to get things right early so that bad habits don’t gain control of the brain maps where it will become difficult to unlearn.

It is a little like what a tennis coach once told me, “If you are planning to go for tennis lessons, then you should do so from the start before you’ve picked up bad habits that will be difficult to get rid off.” I guess the same goes for young children and learning. Start them young to avoid the development of bad habits that will be difficult to by-pass later.