Rafflez Academia S'pore in Coimbatore

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Parents of Young Children: Put Down Your Smartphones
​Too much tech and too little talk could delay communication development.

Parents today are more pressed for time than any other generation of parents—and constantly connected. Largely thanks to the smartphone, parents often find it difficult to separate from their hand-held devices. Checking your phone has become both habit and necessity to manage work and family life. But, all this multitasking could also hurt your young child's ability to learn.

Ways to Enhance Your Child's Communication Skills
You spend so much time making sure your child eats right, has all of their recommended vaccines, and gets enough rest. Yet, his or her communication and social development is just as important. Children gain communication and social skills through listening, talking, reading, singing, and playing with their parents—interactions lost while you are on a smartphone.

Here are three ways parents can enhance their child's communication skills.

Play Non-Electronic Games: Nursery rhymes such as peekaboo, pat-a-cake, and Itsy Bitsy Spider actually serve an important purpose: they promote face-to-face interaction, teach turn-taking, and reinforce essential parts of bonding and conversation. Activities like blowing kisses, waving bye-bye, and clapping all help a child build social interaction and conversation skills. These games all require free hands—for both children and parents!

Share a Common Focus:
Read a book together, share a toy, look at the same dog in a park. When two people focus on the same thing at the same time, they are engaging in what is called "joint attention." Joint attention is a vital part of communication and language development. It is also an important social skill, allowing a child to share an experience with another person and see someone else's point of view. Sharing focus lets a child know you are interested in what they say or do. When parents are on their cell phones, they are not fully focused on the same points of attention as their child and miss key opportunities to build this skill.

Send and Receive Nonverbal Messages: Speaking and understanding words are just part of the communication puzzle. Non-verbal signals such as eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, and body language provide additional information. A child is able to recognize emotions and understand the intent of a message. When a parent is using a smartphone, these nonverbal cues are often reduced or eliminated completely. As a result, children miss out on receiving important nonverbal signals from their parents (part of learning to communicate). Parents may also miss information their kids are trying to send them through pointing, gesturing, staring, etc. These are subtle, but vital signals young children send—especially when they don't speak many words yet.

Reading is essential for a child's success. All too often, the barriers faced by children with difficulty reading outweigh their desire to read and, without proper guidance, they never overcome them. Learning to read is a sequential process; each new skill builds on the mastery of previously learned skills.

Mukilan with his lovely 'Teacher's Day' cake for Rafflez teachers.
Thank you Mukilan ❤

Rafflez is feeling proud ❤

Rafflezians were so focused in their vocabulary building session. They did an awesome job!

Rafflez facilitators
🌟🌟🌟

Thank you Srihari

5 Values You Should Teach Your Child by Age Five
Value #1 : Honesty
Value #2 : Justice
Value #3 : Determination
Value #4 : Consideration
Value #5 : Love

5 Ways to Make Reading Fun

Help your child develop a love of reading with these easy tips.

1. Resurrect the read-aloud.
Reading out loud is not simply a stepping-stone to learning to read silently; it's also a way to build vocabulary, attention skills, and comprehension, as well as--perhaps most important--a love of reading. If you're already doing the one-on-one bedtime story, think about ways to switch up the sessions: Read over breakfast. Encourage siblings to read out loud to each other or to the family pet. Alternate pages or chapters with your child. Or gather the whole family together for a group read-aloud.

2. Take it on the road.
Books are the ultimate portable entertainment--they're durable and impervious to a few drips of water (at least the non-electronic variety), and easy to read in the sunlight. Keep a chapter book in your bag to pull out while you're waiting at a restaurant, sitting poolside or on the beach, hanging out in a tree house, or while camping in a tent with a flashlight.

3. Bring stories to life.
Read horse books before your child goes to horseback-riding camp, Little House on the Prairie before you tour a pioneer village, a bio of a favorite baseball or football player before you visit a sports hall of fame.

4. Be a reading buddy.
If you see your child reading when you aren't, grab your own book and cozy up (well, as close as he'll let you) to read beside him. Prefer a scheduled approach? Try DEAR--Drop Everything and Read--sessions, in which the whole family reads at the same time.

5. Make books a basic.
Look at reading material like food and clothes: You wouldn't leave the refrigerator or the closet empty, so don't let the bookshelf go bare, either. Find a librarian or a teacher who keeps current with what's new and popular for kids, or play the cool card: Get a respected teen to tell your tween what books he enjoyed.

- By Barbara Rowley