How to Nurture Your Baby’s Curiosity

Nurturing Baby's Curiosity

Interactive Ways To Encourage Baby’s Curiosity With Objects

From birth to 2 months, baby’s tiny hands are usually found clenched in fists. According to this parents.com article, How Baby’s Hand Skill Develops, by 3 to 4 months baby “has developed enough muscle coordination to get a grip on small objects placed in front of him.” Free, wiggly fingers combined with a new curiosity may mean you have a “new” baby on your hands; one that is far more interested in objects now than he was a month ago.

Teaching Reading Comprehension Skills at Home

Reading Comprehension

How to Promote Reading Comprehension for the Struggling Reader at Home

By Kumar Sathy

Your child is struggling with reading comprehension, reading like a robot, or just unwilling to voluntarily pick up a book and read. You’ve tried everything and exhausted every reward you could possibly dangle in front of your child, and still, you can’t get your child to voluntarily pick up a book and read.  What’s the answer? It’s strikingly simple, ridiculously rewarding and equally controversial.

As an experienced educator, former school administrator, tutor, and author of educational materials, I am going to catch a lot of flak for this, but I firmly believe that the best thing a parent can do is resist the temptation to intervene, interrupt, and interrogate while a child is reading.

Understanding Toddler Development

Toddler boy reading

How to recognize developmental milestones for Children ages 12 – 36 months

 

Child Development is not a race — there is a wide range of “average” development. Children achieve milestones at different ages depending on their physical, emotional and mental attributes, as well as exposure to different environments, parenting styles and activities. Developmental milestones can be impacted by vision, hearing, general health, medical history, genetics, nutrition and the emotional health of the family.

There are certain developmental milestones, however, that most children reach within a specific time frame. The age when your toddler laughs at your silliness, puts words together to communicate, completes simple puzzles, starts to run and masters other tasks can give you and your pediatrician valuable information regarding how they are developing in relation to other toddlers.

There are three key areas in developmental milestones that your child should be achieving.  These areas are motor development (using their hands, arms and legs in a coordinated manner), cognitive development (thinking, reasoning, using memory and problem solving) and language/social development(communicating and socializing appropriately).

Following you will find a list of developmental milestones.  Under each developmental age, you will find specific milestones for that age. Following the milestones are “red flags” that you should probably bring to the attention of your pediatrician.