3 Tips and Tricks For Birthday Cake Ideas For Your Kid

Most parents often want to make sure that their children's birthdays are memorable. When trying to do this, you have to remember that the cake is a central part of such a birthday, especially when your child is young. This means that if you are to organize the best birthday for them, you would need to make sure that the cake is one that will make a great impression. You would need to do a few things to make sure that the one you end up getting is impressive by their standards. To do this, you would need to follow a few steps, including:

Why It's So Important For Children To Be Active

As a parent I’m sure almost all of you know the difficulty caused by trying to keep your children active. In this day and age it is just too easy to let them sit in front of the TV all day or on the computer. There are so many benefits for children through playing sport and keeping active. Now is the time to try and instil this healthy habit into your children to help them stay healthy in their adult lives.

5 Hobbies For Kids To Build Your Child’s Confidence

Children can suffer from low self-esteem caused by a number of factors; the most common is being bullied at school or not being accepted by the other children in their class. Every child is unique and you cannot mould them or force them to be accepted at school, but you can encourage them to take up a hobby where they can build their confidence and believe in their abilities.


Musical Instruments
Some children are not sporty children, but they can excel at other hobbies such as music. From learning to play the guitar to the piano, once they can see their progress, their confidence will begin to soar. The advantage to your child is they can dream; plan to start a band one day as they get to know the other children that are musically inclined. This means that as their abilities in music improve, they will start making new friends with the same interests, which in turn boost their confidence even further.

Team Sports
Team sports are a wonderful way for children to build positive relationships, believe in their abilities and make new friends. From the fun soccer game to the hockey match, any sport your child is interested in should be encouraged.

You may find that the sports they are interested in are not offered by the school, find out from your local community centre, often they have sporting groups for children and they may offer the team sport your child has a passion for. Remember to always concentrate on their ability in the game and not on whether the team won or lost.

Solo Sports
Lone sports, if you can to call them that, can also be a big confidence booster from cycling to snowboarding and running to swimming. These sports offer children the ability to see their progression, regular exercise also helps build self-esteem through them being able to manage their progress and see that they are improving.

Sports are not only a wonderful outdoor activity where you child can benefit from the fresh air, but they can believe in their ability and increase their confidence if they keep with the sport on a regular basis.

   
Volunteer Work
Volunteer work can make a huge impact in an adult’s life and this also applies to older children and teenagers. It will boost their confidence whether they are helping out in the local children’s hospital or if they are heading to the animal shelter to give a helping hand. Being able to help others immediately helps build confidence, some children enjoy helping the elderly in their area with shopping and other chores. Some help paint fences and mow lawns and some head to the centres where they need volunteers to help with various tasks.

Gardening
If your child is a complete introvert and you cannot get them to join a team sport or do volunteer work as they are so shy, it’s time to start that vegetable patch or flower bed you have been thinking of adding to the garden. As the garden begins to flourish thanks to the work of your child they will start to gain confidence in their ability, slowly you will notice their confidence improve in what they are able to do.

Do you think it’s ever too early to introduce your children to any hobbies? Let us know what you think below.

How To Educate Your Kids On Stranger Danger

Kids need freedom to grow in confidence and independence, as well as to have fun and explore. But while it’s important for them to have time away from their parents, it’s essential to first equip them with the knowledge of how to stay safe and protect themselves, and the skills to get help if they need it. Explaining things in an effective and child-friendly way is important to minimize fear but maximize preparedness. Many parents find it difficult to address the subject of stranger danger in particular, because they don’t want to run the risk of making their child anxious or paranoid about adults or the world around them.

Benefits Of Musical Learning For Kids

What is truly inspiring are the piles of research showing that music can motivate learning and provide an intellectually stimulating environment. Currently, music companies such as Takelessons strive to create these learning environments by providing safe, affordable, fun music lessons to kids of all ages.
There are several reasons why listening to music works to create an ideal learning environment. One primary function it serves is to keep the mind awake and stimulated. Along with that it provides a relaxing stimulation that helps to relieve the pressure some may feel in an academic setting.

The Best Pets For Kids: Choosing Your Child’s First Pet

Dogs have various personalities and character traits so when you choose your dog; you should take these factors into account. For example, you may prefer a small breed over a large one, or one with long hair as opposed to short hair. Labrador Retrievers, for example, have been found to be a good fit for children and families so you may decide that they are the most suitable breed.

Encouraging Creative Play In Child Development

Why are children naturally creative? Shapes are curious to children and they like to be self-expressive by drawing people and things using an array of colours to provoke a positive reaction in others. A judgment towards a child can feel devastating to them as all children want to be accepted and loved.

Let Your Child Grow Up Happy: Involve Creative Play In Child Development

Children absorb a lot of information from a young age. They will draw pictures of family invoking happy memories. A child can work through emotional discomfort through creativity.

The Importance of Creativity in Children

Children can be very energetic, but they will step into their own little world and remain quiet when concentrating on being creative. Children must be able to process their thoughts and emotional discomforts and often they do this through creative acts like drawing. If a child is allowed to be creative at school, this can highlight to a teacher what the child is thinking and feeling.

Schools can arrange great days out for kids, including a visit to a zoo, nature resort or sports event to learn about nature and animals, art and science or sports and leisure.

Creative Opportunities for Children

If children are allowed to think and play creatively, their happiness will be apparent in the lives of their family. Some children experience a difficulty in concentrating on schoolwork, but creative activities can be helpful. Other children find it difficult to open up to teachers and friends and their troubles may be apparent throughout their creative works. Therefore it is important that schools offer children a wide range of opportunities, including learning about music, woodwork, paper, photography and painting to stimulate their creativity to help them to open up about other issues in time. There are endless opportunities to invoke a child’s creative spark.

Children can be easily influenced from a young age. They can be bullied for being different, but it is important that you sometimes encourage this difference to manifest during their creative spells. Take a group of children on a field trip for example to encourage their learning of different cultures and ethnicities. If children are allowed to mix with different cultures and ethnicities, this can give a child a generous scope for creative expression. Children are forever attaining information throughout their daily lives and what they discover is essential for their personal development. If a child feels independent and is encouraged during the creative process, this can be rewarding and can help a child to feel wanted and nurtured. This can be especially important for disabled children.

Play in Child Development

Encouraging Creative Play In Child DevelopmentChildren must be allowed to act out their curiosity towards life through creative play. Familiar materials, including crayons and paints are some creative tools to use to encourage this self-expression and imagination. Children can become irritable if they are unable to engage in creative play each day. This type of activity encourages sensory exploration in children. Difficult acts that a child finds frustrating at first glance soon become attainable as the child’s motor skills become familiar the more an act is practiced. Through creative play, children find that they are more able to express themselves and work through any frustrations that they might have.

Through play, children are able to express and cope with their feelings and it also helps to relieve stress and pressure for them meaning that they can just be themselves. This activity helps develop each child’s unique perspective and individual style of creative expression, thus expressing the child’s personal, unique responses to the surrounding environment. Play is a self-expressive activity that draws on the child’s powers of imagination. Therefore it is an open-ended, free-form and children have the freedom to try out new ideas as well as build on and experiment with the old.

It provides an excellent opportunity for integrating and including children with disabilities in your program. The opportunities play provides for control and independence are important issues for any child but are especially important for these youngsters.

Encouraging Children To Read: 1st Grade Reading Activities

Benefits of Reading

We know reading strengthens and builds brain connections, improves concentration, teaches children about the world around them, improves a child's vocabulary and creativity (the list goes on). It's therefore vitally important we encourage this generation of kids to read whilst reminding them that it is a great form of entertainment away from the xBox or Playstation.

And there's no time like the present, whether you are a teacher, parent or librarian it's an opportunity to encourage reading and storytelling whilst developing children's literacy skills.

Each and every child should be involved no matter their age or reading ability and with so many literacy teaching resources available to teachers and parents, creating independent, confident readers is easier than ever.

Encouraging Kids to Read

The key to getting kids to learn to read effecively is to ignite their interest and love of reading so they carry on reading outside of the classroom in their own time, out of choice.

Educators and parents should use the day as an opportunity to celebrate reading, books, authors and illustrators. Why not set up book clubs or book swaps and if you can why invite authors or storytellers to your establishment to share their stories and experiences first hand; perhaps even ‘adopt' them for regular visits too. Take popular stories and create themed weeks around them to keep momentum.

A great tip is is to make books visible at all times whether in school or at home, display them wherever you can to trigger interest in reading, out of sight is said after all to mean out of mind.

You can turn to story sacks which provide a ready supply of ways to create a multi-dimensional storytelling, since they can be used both indoors and outdoors they are perfect all year round.

 Make Reading Fun

Puppets and props are also very popular ways to bring stories to life; as is role play, encouraging the children to act out the characters they are reading and learning about. Turning stories into games is a fun and less pressured way of creating stories, and promotes involvement form everyone.

A familiar technique is for the pupils to delve into their own experiences, days out, family holidays and use these events to write their own stories; it's not just about improving their reading skills but inspiring their creativity and writing skills.

When I was younger I recall a popular TV show had the ironic caption "turn off the TV and do something less boring instead!" so let's do just that and support this "big, loud, happy celebration of reading", a world where stories or books are no longer desired is simply unimaginable for me.