Did you know that Monday, January 4th is National Trivia Day?! Trivia is a great way to improve cognitive skills. Many of our kids struggle to retain information, so trivia games are a great exercise for the mind. Trivia also allows their prior knowledge to grow and improve working memory, leading to greater creativity, conversation, innovation, and problem-solving skills. Trivia is yet another important tool to help facilitate your child or teen’s developing brain. Take some time this week to play a trivia game with your students/children, and even see if you can make Trivia Night a weekly habit. My favorites are Brain Quest, Trivial Pursuit, and Jeopardy!
Another important part of intellectual
development for children is learning vowel sounds for speech. If you follow along on my instagram this Tuesday, January 5, you’ll get some great tips on teaching vowel sounds! Understanding vowel sounds is a very important part of literacy. Vowels are found in every syllable of a word and are often the only distinguishing difference between similar words (like pint/pent). Knowing how vowels differ in sound can improve reading, speech, and spelling.
This week, focus on accepting yourself; not only accepting yourself but loving yourself for every bit of who you are! This is an important message to instill in our youngsters. Teach your students and children to embrace their “quirks” or the things that make them unique and help them to understand that these are the things that make them interesting and themselves. A simple way that I like to think about this is that “normal” is just a construct. While this may be a little complex of a concept for younger children, instilling that EVERYONE is unique and that they are wonderful for being themselves is a great lesson in personal development.
On Fridays, I am introducing a new series on my social media called #functionalfriday. I want to provide parents and teachers with a variety of life skills to teach your children. I see these memes all over the internet about how “school didn’t teach me to pay bills'' or “school didn’t teach me to set a table.” I want to make sure that I am preparing everyone to the best of my ability for all aspects of life. So, this week I want to talk about something that’s been new to most of us this past year: making the remote learning space a functional one.
When you are remotely learning, it is important that you separate your space by use. For example, don’t do school work in bed. Why? You will associate your bed with work and you won’t sleep as well. This is an important life skill for every age; having dedicated spaces helps keep your brain organized and produces more fruitful and focused activity. A dedicated work space enables students to focus, minimize distractions, and mentally gets them into a work mode. Even more, it helps create balance between working, free time, and sleep time while learning from home. Everything is so intertwined these days, so it is especially important in this new socially distanced environment in which we are navigating. Be sure that you are monitoring your children/students and making sure that they are not only surviving but thriving in their environment!
Check out my Instagram for some more great tips this week and have a wonderful first full week of 2021!
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