Smart Cookie Club

Early Childhood: How to bring more nature into preschool While it may seem like kids in nature are simply enjoying carefree play time, serious learning is happening when they are outside.

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Mom’s have the ability to make any day special. From make-believe adventures to kitchen messes to perfect hugs, it’s impossible to spend time with your mom and not feel happy. Call it her superpower.

The fact of the matter is PARENTS are real super hero’s with real superpowers because every single day they do something extraordinary by helping build the foundation for their child’s life of learning.

Happy Mother's Day! ❤

Empowerment means guiding your child in a manner that encourages their belief in their own abilities and potential for positive growth. During their school years and when they move into adult life, children will need to rely on their inner strength and sense of self-belief to meet and overcome difficulties.

8 ways to empower your child:
1) Give your child a voice
2) Discourage prejudice and gender stereotyping
3) Explain yourself
4) Listen and engage
5) Teach them about diversity
6) Trust and support them
7) Create a positive environment
8) Consider a rewards system

Emotional regulation is essential to children's day to day life because it affects their understanding of situations, how they respond, their behaviour and their enjoyment of life.

Contact Smart Cookie Club for more practical play-based learning strategies to enrich your child's development.

Children and even adults learn best and retain the most information when they engage their senses. Many of our favourite memories are associated with one or more of our senses: for instance, the smell of a summer night campfire or a song you memorized the lyrics to with a childhood friend. Now, when your nostrils and eardrums are stimulated with those familiar smells and sounds respectively, your brain triggers a flashback memory to those special times.

Did you know that providing opportunities for children to actively use their senses as they explore their world through ‘sensory play’ is crucial to brain development – it helps to build nerve connections in the brain’s pathways.

Sensory activities facilitate exploration and naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate and explore. The sensory activities allow children to refine their thresholds for different sensory information helping their brain to create stronger connections to process and respond to sensory information.

For example, initially a child may find it difficult to play appropriately with a peer when there are other things going on in the environment with conflicting noise. However, through sensory play exploring sounds and tasks a child learns to adapt to being able to block out the noise which is not important and focus on the play which is occurring with their peer.

Another example is a child who is particularly fussy with eating foods with a wet texture such as spaghetti, the use of sensory play can assist the child in touching, smelling and playing with the texture in an environment with little expectation.

As the child develops trust and understanding of this texture it helps build positive pathways in the brain to say it is safe to engage with this food. Sensory play literally helps shape what children to believe to be positive and safe in the brain. Ultimately, shaping the choices children make and impacting behaviour.