Having been a pre-school teacher for twenty-five years and a mother for eleven, I am convinced that in the end, communication and God’s love are the keys to a successful relationship with your children. The catch is – how do we successfully communicate this love to our children?
As parents we always want the best for our children and so we strive to do the right thing to ensure our children grow and develop into well rounded little humans. Experts say toys are one thing parents could use to improve brain development, but do we really know what kind toys to use for this purpose?
With every new generation of school going kids, comes the important topic of healthy school lunch boxes. What are some of the healthy things to include in the lunchbox? Why is it important for kids to eat healthy foods while they are at school? What are the best drinks for lunchboxes?
The Chicco range of cutlery starts when your child first begins to accept a spoon. Beginning with the Silicone Spoon, perfectly suited to small mouths and delicate gums, to the older fork and spoon sets for when baby can start feeding themselves, gradually introducing metal child-sized cutlery for baby to eat just like the grown-ups.
Muscle tone is the amount of tension (or resistance to movement) in muscles when they are at rest. Our muscle tone helps us to hold our bodies upright when we are sitting and standing. Changes in muscle tone are what enable us to move. Since tone only describes a muscle when it is inactive or resting, it is quite possible for a child with low tone to still be very strong when they exert themselves and activate their muscles. There’s a big difference between muscle tone and muscle strength.
Allergic reactions are becoming more prevalent around the world, especially in more developed countries. This heightened sensitivity may be due to increased exposure to harmful environmental factors, such as air pollution and cigarette smoke, as well as cleaner living environments with fewer micro-organisms and bacterial exposure
The weaning period provides the baby with more nutrients and is also an important step for the psychological, emotional and educational development.
Surely, with how the world we live in is changing, and with all of our technological advances, something as old fashioned as nursery rhymes should be a thing of the past? Toddlers now have access to televisions, Ipads, cell phones and YouTube, and some even know how to operate these on their own…..so should nursery rhymes (which have been around for centuries) be given the boot?
In that moment, when this little life first comes into the world, you can’t help but become emotional. I cried big tears; I was overwhelmed with love and pride. The kind of pride that only jumps into your body the second your child is born, and it’s this newfound pride that stays with you from then onwards. “Dads, you are hugely influential in the eyes of your children. Don’t be content with the fact that you’re simply a dad. Instead, challenge yourself to become a dad who is a force in the lives of your wife and children.”
Preschool and prep-school teachers are modern day superheroes. They gently introduce our little ones to a love of learning and creativity, yet they are also tough enough to manage anything that could affect their little charges. Even the horror of head lice in the classroom.
We ensure all our products are age and stage appropriate for your little ones.
Starting solid foods is an exciting time for you and your baby. Research shows that it is most beneficial to introduce solid foods around 6 months of age (but never before 4 months!).
Fiber helps keep your tot’s digestion regular. Protein is a key building block of little growing bodies and is essential for muscle development.
Munchkin, the award-winning global baby lifestyle company expands its commitment to animal conservation organisations through a new line of its #1 selling Miracle® 360° cup, called “Wild Love,” designed to feature at-risk animals. The cups, now available at Baby City, help families teach children empathy and respect for animals at a time when more than one million species are threatened with extinction. Inspired by the important work these organizations are doing, Munchkin is making a substantial donation to both the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and The Whale Sanctuary Project.
Parenting is not easy. But, parenting a child on the spectrum is even harder. This is because there are numerous challenges that come with it. One of the challenges is explaining to your neurotypical child about their ASD sibling.
Parents have an inherent right and duty to form part of their child’s lives. However, it often happens that parents of a child cannot see eye to eye as to what is in their child’s best interest. More often than not, when parents are divorced, separated or not living together, issues arise regarding the children they share. And then there is the case where parents want full custody over their children. These issues may range from the amount of contact the other parent has, the school the child may attend, or what extra-mural activities the child should pursue.
Much like the rest of the world, the typical South African family structure has changed over the years. The prevalence of single parent families is on the rise and increasingly, women head more households. The combined effect of these two structural shifts has seen a growing number of single working mothers in the South African workforce.
Dietary fiber comes from plants: think fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, beans, nuts and seeds. Diets higher in fiber can help lower cholesterol, control blood sugar, maintain bowel health, manage constipation and help promote a healthy weight. In fact, in epidemiological studies, populations with higher dietary fiber intakes tend to have lower chronic disease rates overall. A higher fiber intake provided by foods like fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole- and high-fiber grain products is likely to be lower in calories, fat and added sugar.
Holidays are like cats! They creep into your lap for a cuddle and just when you start feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, they jet off to some unknown place, leaving you feeling disappointed and perhaps a little cold! Is this not true of these school holidays? They crept in, had a cuddle and left – just like that!
While school violence is prevalent and widespread, schools are also being targeted by criminals for electronic devices such as computers and IT equipment.
Once your baby can sit up and bring their hands to their mouth you can start with the Boon Pulp. Munching and crunching, all require lots of practice for babies who are just learning to self-feed, and the results can be messy. The Boon Pulp Silicone Feeder is a tidy solution: it works like a mesh feeder, but it’s sturdier and keeps the mess more contained, so your child can use her brand-new teeth to gnaw away at healthy snacks without requiring an entire roll of paper towels for clean up afterwards. Self-feeding offers a great way to teach babies dexterity and hand-eye co-ordination.
When it comes to children, strong commitment and love are not negotiable. Unfortunately, not all parents honour this duty, specifically their legal duty to maintain the well-being of their children. Considering this, the child maintenance system ensures that all parents honour their duty to maintain/support their children.
As December rolls around, many parents get to breathe a momentary sigh of relief that a monthly school fee payment won’t be going off this month. That is until you remember that you’ll be expected to re-start payments again in January and this time it will come with new text books, school stationery, uniforms and for the bigger “kids”, you might even be paying boarding school or accommodation fees.
When co-holders experience difficulties in exercising their responsibilities and rights, they must agree on a parenting plan to regulate the exercise of their rights and responsibilities as a prerequisite before approaching the court. They must first seek the assistance of the family advocate, social worker or psychologist; alternatively, they must go for a mediation facilitated by a social worker or other suitably qualified person.
Starting solids can be an exciting time. I remember when we started our son on solids. We had my brother and the grandparents over. He was propped up in a chair and we all watched as my husband and I fed him some mashed butternut from a spoon. The video is so cute, the words of praise about how clever he was is quite impressive, and his outfit was cuter than cute. However, now when I watch the video, I shudder. I shudder because I can now see all the non-verbal signals that he was sending, saying he was not ready. We could have waited a week longer, just to give him time. If I had known better, I would have done better.
Most of us are scared of the dentist which means dental care can easily be overlooked but, taking good care of your teeth will not only leave you with a brilliant smile, it will also keep your mouth healthy. By following a good at-home care regime and regular dental visits, you can decrease the likelihood of health problems in the future.
Thinking processes,I define as the manipulation of information. Problem solving requires reflective thinking; reflective thinking encourages critical thinking and develops a range of thinking skills. According to Scheffer and Rubenfield (2000), the critical thinking skills are; analysis, applying standards, discriminating, information seeking, and logical reasoning, predicting and transforming knowledge. Analysing, defined as the ability of separating or breaking a whole into parts to discover their nature, function and relationship, is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). When making a drawing, both the content and concept of the drawing are actively analyzed because they must be broken into parts so that they can be understood before the concept can be drawn in a student’s book. Through this engagement each student processes, understands, explores, and integrates, the content and concept they are interacting with in the drawing. For example, ‘global warming’ can be represented visually, left, Examples of how two elementary school participants represented features after learning about global warming, (Katz, 2017, pg. 238). The child draws the factory, water in solid or liquid form, while the symbols for temperature are communicated and thus concepts are mapped through the visual mode of language. In the second example an abstract concept is drawn, how the students feel about global warming. Left, Examples of affective interpretations of two elementary school participants in relation to global warming content, (Katz, 2017, pg. 239). In the drawing, the child wrote ‘Don’t cut me!’ Drawing operates to present two different types of information. In this case, the way the task is directed impacts the way a drawer analyses the content. Since alphabetic language, symbols, numbers have intersubjective meaning drawing a diagram brings together different codes of symbolic thought in a focused ‘slow thinking’ method, because drawing takes time to represent content and concept on the white page. See Daniel Kahneman for thinking fast and low. The literate person develops practices in code breaking, text meaning, pragmatic text use and text critique & analysis (Luke & Freebody, 1997) with the use of critical thinking skills. Discriminating, the ability of recognizing differences and similarities among things or situations is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Logical reasoning is the ability to make inferences or conclusions that are supported in, or justified by evidence (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). In 1988, Johnson developed a task where students select one English language rule that they want to illustrate in a poster to communicate its conventions to the class. The freedom to select a rule empowered student with agency. “[S]tudents` explain how their drawing represent the rule” (Van Meter & Garner, 2005, pg. 295). Later the visual stimulus is put up in the classroom, arguable to aid memory, support student’s motivation and application of knowledge. This task is an example of concepts being translated across linguistic modes from the verbal linguistic mode of reading the rule to the visual mode of representing the rule. Secondly, encouraging thinking skills to remember because the rule was visualised for memory retention. Also apply knowledge, as the rule was designed in a poster, and problem solve as the child was asked to convert written to visual mode. The development of higher order thinking skills was practiced in this task. Predicting, as the ability of envisioning a plan and its consequences, is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). I propose that ‘innovating’ designs is part of visualising a plan, for example envisioning architectural structures which is a structural example of composition planning in EGD. Also, to predict experiment outcomes in science or colours in art for paint colour mixing. Reflective thinking is part of the critical thinking process defined as analyzing and making judgments (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Creative thinking is considered as holistic thinking where various parts are considered in unison. One part develops in unity with another part in relation to the problem being solved. Transforming knowledge, as the ability to change or convert the condition, nature, form or function of concepts within contexts,is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Barbara Tversky from Teachers College, Columbia University explains the benefits of “messy lines [that promote] discovery of new ideas” (Tversky, 2011, pg. 16). She explains how a variety of different marks on a page have “context dependent meaning related to their mathematical or Gestalt properties” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). She clarifies that marks, which make up the drawings, represent externalized symbolic thought. The act of drawing is a union between perceptive skill and cognitive skill where the perceptive skill involves ‘seeing’ in context of the object and the cognitive skill involves ‘thinking’ in context of the idea. She refers to this as “constructive perception” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). It seems that when perception and thinking processes operate in tandem creative thinking is operating to innovate new ideas and products from existing knowledge and context. Tversky explains that messy lines aid thought because they are ambiguous, “pre-categorical, so they allow for many interpretations” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). Messy lines are evident in Michelangelo’s Horse Composition (right, and detail a, Studies of a Horse and a Sketch of a Battle Scene, authors photograph from Ashmoleum Museum Oxford). The lines look like they were drawn quickly to visually externalize memory or observation and understanding of the structure of the horse for manipulation in a new composition. It could be argued that the horse was moving while it was being drawn. Interestingly, the observation of the horse (an uncommon subject for Michelangelo who focused more on the human body) is visible as two different poses from observation drawing on the same leaf of paper. A plan drawing for arranging the subject of the person and the horse is visually explored alongside the detailed horse representation. The drawer is creating from perception towards innovation thus using ‘constructive perception’. According to Ewa Grabska “Although designers during design process can form mental images in their heads, the majority of them do much better when those images are out of
If you are a parent or are around parents of young children, there is a high chance that you’ve heard about developmental milestones. You may have even read about it in a baby book or an article, heard from your paediatrician or from any other professional specialising in early childhood development. You may have heard parents proudly speak about the fact that their child has skipped certain milestones, such as crawling and has gone straight to walking, and so they’re now “ahead of the pack”. You may have seen the complete opposite, parents in a frenzy because their child is one month behind in some of their milestones. You may have heard others completely disregard milestones all together. So what is the fuss all about? How important are milestones really?
As a father of two boys, I am constantly inspired and challenged, to expose my children to the variety of cultural avenues available to them. For those who are not aware, I am both a music educator and performer and have spent many years collaborating with, or working alongside, artists of many kinds. Being involved in the cultural department here at Crawford La Lucia, I have to been exposed to the various arts disciplines on offer and have been privileged to work alongside colleagues who invest in their pupils with determination, creativity, and excellence.
With Christmas only a month away, we asked Chicco South Africa to put together a Toy Guide for Christmas. CHICCO BABY SENSES PIRATE SORTER A pull-along treasure chest that encourages children to start puzzle solving from young. Place the shapes in the corresponding holes and store the treasure in the chest. Perfect from 1 year upwards and a great aid for motor skills. Retailers: Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone, Loot and selected Kids Emporium stores. 2. CHICCO BABY SENSES ANIMAL COTTAGE Teach your baby puzzle solving and motor skills with a shape sorter. Five colourful, decorated shapes can be inserted into corresponding holes while 5 different keys open the corresponding doors. Helps develop hand/eye coordination. Strong contrasting colours and popular animals make this a winner with young toddlers. Retailers: Babies R Us, Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone.co.za, Loot and selected Kids Emporium stores. 3. CHICCO MOVE & GROW BABY RODEO A high-end toy for people that want to really splash out on their child. The Move & Grow Baby Rodeo is a child’s first indoor pony and the coolest ride-on. The electronic toy comes to life with sensors and moves his eyes and neighs when stroked or fed with a carrot. 3 functions include rocker, ride on (where child can push themselves) and activity centre that includes buttons, music and sounds. Suitable up to 25kgs. Retailers: Takealot and Thekidzone. 4. CHICCO FIT & FUN MONKEY STRIKE The Fit & Fun range from Chicco keeps toddlers active no matter what the weather may be like outside. Monkey strike is a 2 mode game that is a modern take on 10 pin bowling. It aids creativity, teaches numbers and helps learn colours. Comes with soft bowling ball. Pins can also be split to create stacking towers. Retailers: Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone and Loot. 5. CHICCO FIT & FUN MISTER RING An electronic toy to keep your child active no matter what the weather, Fit & Fun Mister Ring is a unique take on the traditional ring toss. The base rotates at two different speeds, challenging the child’s attention every time. Comes with 8 coloured rings of lightweight plastic which make it safe for indoor play. 6 different melodies play while base is spinning. Great for stimulating manual coordination and motor skills. The perfect toy for toddles with aim. Retailers: Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone and Loot. 6. CHICCO FIT & FUN JUMP AND FIT PLAY MAT A fantastic take on the old classic Hopscoth, with a new and modern twist. An electronic toy, the playmat has two game modes and players can increase difficulty as child develops. Lights, sounds and music make it a highly entertaining way of staying fit whilst playing and developing manual skills. Retailers: Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone and Loot. 7. CHICCO HAPPY MUSIC BAND DRUM A colourful electric drum that lets children develop through the joy of music and musical expression. 3 electronic activities including free drumming, ‘keep-the-beat’ and composing to really let the rock star in your baby come out. Includes 4 LED lights to keep baby entertained as they express themselves. Retailers: Takealot, Thekidzone and Loot. 8. CHICCO HAPPY MUSIC BABY STAR GUITAR An electric toy guitar full of fun features to bring out the rock star in your child. Select from three different musical styles (Rock, Pop and Blues) and choose among 3 play modes (short tunes, pre-recorded melodies and follow me). The 23 pre-recorded melodies can be enriched with the 3 different mixer functions: drums, vibration and acceleration of the rhythm. Retailers: Takealot, Lilliputs, Thekidzone, and Loot. 9. CHICCO HAPPY MUSIC DJ MIXY A first around the world – a DJ consol for babies. Let them scratch it like a real DJ, create their own backing tracks and select a melody and add different sounds to it. Increase or decrease the speed of the music and have the most fun playing with real sounds, in their own style. Allows for complete free expression. With two game modes and 3 lights that change colour for them to enjoy. Retailers: Takealot, Thekidzone and Loot. 10. CHICCO BABY SENSES STACK N FUN CUPS Create a fun tower with Baby Senses Stack n Fun Cups, the easiest way to learn numbers by seeing how the size of the cup goes up with the number that comes next. Simple puzzle solving makes this a great aid to get a toddlers mind school-ready whilst having fun. Includes a hole at the top of the tower where balls are placed to slide down the tower to the base. Retailers: Babies R Us, Takealot, Thekidzone and Loot.
