Sparking Children's Thinkibility
Mindboggling Questions, Creativity and Curiosity
Do you have any special food call? A special ice cream call? Or a banana call? Playing with language can we fun as well as a serious business. Watching the TED-Ed video by Anne Savage provided us with plenty of inspiration for pondering about how we communicate. A think dive into communication from a different …
Children say the most amazing, craziest and truest things. We have a little notebook filled with treasures called "Pappaja". In the notebook, I have collected wonderful and mind-boggling things that my daughter has said. Just before her second birthday, she had a habit of adding "ja" to every word, "ja" means "yes" and I …
Children love stories! Storytelling fosters imagination and creativity and transports children into magical worlds and faraway places. Imagination is about making pictures in our minds. Preformed pictures of a story in a book, somewhat limits a child’s imitation to create the picture. In storytelling .gestures, voices, rhythm, repetition, and movements a bring the story alive. …
Move your hands to give your child nonverbal cues - something tat everyone can do to support the vocabulary learning. Children learn an amazing number of words. Like little sponges, they soak up new words. But there are differences in the number of words that children learn during their first years. New research suggests that …
Toddlers love to talk and they learn an amazing number of new words every day. Yet deciphering the words of two to three-year olds may be tricky. So it is easy to think that toddlers lack a basic idea of how to string a sentence together. But toddlers’ babbling and chattering may be more advanced …
What is it like to bilingual? Well, the experiences can of course vary enormously but for a bilingual child it is a great feeling to know that she is not alone. Below are some books that can help bilingual children to understand that other children might feel and meet the same problems and experiences …
Exploring concepts should be an engaging activity. Often children are simply taught to memorise basic concepts that are descriptions of size (big/little) or show location (up/down). Children learn these types of concepts by listening to adults and older children, following commands and directions. Concepts are also often learnt by reading books. An active approach to …
Cornelia Funke’s latest book is a ghost story – Ghost Knight. The story is set in Salisbury Cathedral and Lacock Abbey. Jon and Ella meet a pack of pack of vengeful ghosts and they work to uncover the secrets of a centuries-old murder. Reading ghosts stories is almost as scary as writing your own! There …
What is it? Some things seem to make sense and we rarely question them. Yet, sometimes things are not entirely, as we think. Many of us would agree that young children use language, just as we do, to classify and make sense of the world. A recent study suggests that the labels we use to …
Continue reading "Children, Categorization, Words and Other Clues"
The advantages with bilingualism may well make up for the struggle. Well, it is a struggle to learn not only two languages but to adapt to different ways of expressing the same thing and to find ways of expressing things in a language that does not have a specific word or expression for a certain …
Steven Pinker talks about the idea that the stuff of thought which is a window to language. Or why not watch an animated version about language. . .
Making Sounds A wonderful way to stimulate your baby to make sounds is to use poems. By reciting short poems several times to your baby and then after a while letting him make a noise when you leave out the end word, you can encourage your baby to “talk”. You may not understand the sounds …
Eye Contact Babies love faces and they will stop smiling if you remove the eye contact. In many culture, having eye contact with the person you are communicating with is essential. Non-verbal clues are often picked up. Focus on the Mouth It would seem reasonable to assume that your baby tries to look into …
Mind-Boggling Questions “Why is the grass green?” “Why does a ladybird have spot?” “Why does the story end?”Answering these mind-boggling questions is not easy.Around their third birthday children start to ask questions. Question asking is an important skill that will encourage your child to continue to be curious and interested in the world. It is …
Swim or Sink The first four years of her life, my daughter spoke Swedish. Then she was thrown into an English-speaking world. We continued to speak Swedish at home, and after spending a year watching other children at the kindergarten, she began school without having spoken any English. The occasional "hi" and "bye". But that …
Millions of Words Millions of words and one million sentences! A ten months old baby may have slept several hours per day but she has also been exposed to a constant stream of sounds and words. Babies are born with the capacity to learn any language. During the first year, a baby learns to distinguish …
Pointing Is there a relationship between right-handed pointing, gender, and communication? Well, research suggests that girls use right-handed pointing and they tend to talk earlier than boys do (although the difference is small, and many boys start to talk earlier than girls do). A baby begins to use pointing sometime between 6 and 12 months. …
0-3 months Begins to imitate some sounds. Recognises familiar voices. Turns towards familiar sounds. Cries in different ways for different needs. Makes different sounds - coo, gurgle, click, stops, grunt and pops. Startles to loud sounds. 3-6 months Exploring the vocal tract capabilities. Raspberry or click sound, babbling and imitating sounds. Moves eyes around …
0-3 months Listen carefully and you can hear the first coo, gurgle, grunt, click, stop and pops. 3-6 months Exploring the vocal tract capabilities. Long vowels, squeals, yells, growls, trills, and friction noises. Raspberry or click sounds, you might hear consonants like “m-m-m-m” or “b-b-b-b”. 6-10 months Enjoys vocal play and experiments with …
Listen Inside the Words Phonological awareness refers to a child’s ability to be aware of the sound structure of spoken words and it is considered to help children with learning to read and write. Phonological awareness means that a child focuses the attention on listening to the sounds inside the words rather than focusing …
We cannot live only for ourselves. One thousand fibres connect us with each other. Herman Melville Squeals They might not be the baby’s first words but it is one of those magical conversations in life. ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-go-go-go-go-go’, and then she catches sight of you. ‘Eeeee!’ she squeals and she reminds you of a little seal …
Similar Meanings When your child is around three you can play with words that have similar meanings. This is a great way to increase not only your child vocabulary but also to challenge thinking. A child learn to use synonyms by talking and observing other people use language. A word can change its meaning …
´ Doing Things Together One of the greatest joys of being a parent is to engage in various activities. Doing things together teaches you about your child, and about the world. For a child, it is a marvellous way of engaging with you. Children learn by engaging together with their parents and other people. …
Many people believe that a fundamental difference between humans and animals is that humans have a language but animals do not. In a recent study, a border collie, Chaser, was taught the names of toys by introducing the toys one by one. The trainer repeated the name of the toy when Chaser brought it back. …
A baby can communicate by using their body language and making sounds. But everyone knows that a baby cannot talk. The road to language skills is complex and despite intensive research, there is still a cloud of mystery surrounding language learning.Many people believe children learn to talk by imitating and copying the words that adults …
Universal Babbling Babble is a universal behaviour of humans, and it comes on a specific developmental timetable in infancy. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with widely varying effects on the sound. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their …
Six to ten months During the canonical babbling stage, six to ten months, the baby makes simple combinations of consonants and vowels, and this begins to sound quite speech like. The basic canonical syllables are building blocks of word, but they have no meaning, at least not for a parent. Babbling infants produce identical, …
Language development is often cited as a sex difference, and it is generally agreed upon that girls begin to talk earlier than boys do. Generally, babies say their first word around their first birthday, and girls tend to say their first “real word” a month earlier than boys do (researchers tend not to count words like …
"Slow" Explosion of Words The first words can be heard around the child’s first birthday, and the vocabulary is increasing for every day. But some children wait a bit longer and as long as child is communicating by using gestures, facial expressions, and making sounds there is no need to worry. Nouns are often …
Crying the first three months All babies cry, even healthy babies. Crying is a form of communication and babies cry for a reason. A newborn baby cries for between one hour to three hours per day. How you hear the difference? A baby relies on her parents to give them food, comfort, and warmth. From …
Juggling Two Systems A bilingual infant juggles two systems for communicating. They learn two sets of sounds, two words to name every concept, and two grammatical systems. Do they prefer one language to the other? Recent research suggests that babies are like little sponges in the womb and that they can distinguish between two languages. …
Foundation for language Speech development is a wonderful thing to observe, and the foundation is laid in the womb. Babies can hear the mother’s voice best but other voices can be head in the womb. Babies learn about the sound system of language and the process of language acquisition starts by discovering small differences between …
