Guest Post! Primrose Schools:Give Your Kids A Head Start

I am such a big advocate of treating your kids like the people they are and giving them a head start on anything and everything you can. If you treat your children like adults in the sense that you do not underestimate the wonders they can do, your child will blossom right before your eyes.

Kathleen Thomas has the right idea when it comes to teaching toddlers how to write. Let them be themselves, do not push what you believe to be "right" or "wrong" when it comes to the scribbles your little ones makes while first learning how to write. They are learning in the correct manner for their age naturally!
Kathleen works for Primrose Schools and when she introduced me to this unique school, I was instantly jealous that there was not one where I live. This school is amazing! Primrose uses what they call a Balanced Learning curriculum to teach children from as early as six weeks up to five years. What I love most about this school is the fact that they not only teach the basics you would find at any other child care facility, this school goes above and beyond to teach their little students character development! The teachers at Primrose guide our tiny toddler sponges through learning honesty, generosity, and how to treat the people around them.

Check out the awesome article Kathleen wrote about children and the way they learn writing through natural drawings and scribbles. She has some good tips on encouraging your child to love writing as well.

 Give your Kids a Head Start

As infants turn to toddlers and then become small children, they are always watching the adults around them for clues as to what life is all about. Children see adults writing with pens or pencils and soon mimic what they see, picking up a pencil or a crayon and making their first attempts to “write” just like they see adults do. This “scribble writing” of young children is considered by experts to be a legitimate form of emergent writing, as the children are most assuredly grasping the concept that the marks on the paper are meant to convey some kind of meaning. Parents should cherish and celebrate these first milestones in their child’s intellectual development.

At this stage it is important for a parent or teacher to refrain from trying to stress proper letter formation too soon. A focus on penmanship and getting the letters right too soon can be discouraging. Children at the scribbling stage are still developing their fine motor skills and coordination, so stressing penmanship too early can send the false message that writing is more about making all the letters correctly than it is about communicating ideas. We want children to learn that writing is a fun way to express themselves, and not something that they might come to think of as “hard”, so that when they get to preschool it is not a dreaded activity. It is critical to always keep in mind where a child is at developmentally, and gently guide and encourage them by making the practice of making letters fun.

As children develop, it is important to encourage them to communicate their stories, ideas and messages through writing. All parents need to do to provide this encouragement is have a bit of patience, a lot of paper, and pens and pencils. The child will do the rest on its own.

Here are a few tips to help foster an environment of encouragement for your little one that should help them develop a life-long love of writing: 

• Keep pencils and paper everywhere. A child is more likely to engage in “spontaneous” forays into writing if the tools are near at hand.

• Read. Read. Read to your child. It cannot be overstressed how important it is to instill the idea that reading and writing can and should be fun. 

• Children love to imitate their parents, so find ways to incorporate writing with them in your daily activities. Make a shopping list together, or write a letter to a friend or relative.

Kathleen is a Communications Coordinators for the network of day care facilities belonging to the AdvancED® accredited family of Primrose day care schools.  Primrose Schools are located in 16 states throughout the U.S. and are dedicated to delivering progressive, early childhood, Balanced Learning® curriculum throughout their preschools.