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Challenge: Walking the Talk

Positive Parenting: Steps to help your child learn

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The global pandemic has produced a sharper center to the need to keep children interested and learning at home. Below are the five attentive activities that have given great leverage to parents:

Plant a vegetable garden

Planting and being in close connection with plants is a magic gift of nature. Kids of all ages must experience this pleasure and the life lessons vegetable growing practices.

As a freshman, one does not have to go out and buy the seeds. One could start with the peas, capsicum, or fruits from their own vegetable waste. The routine of preparing the soil, setting the seed, and daily watering is an activity in learning the art of training. The joy of seeing the sapling sprout and turn into a plant, the responsibility for the plant, with a look out for any bugs or pests, are robust education. The view of baby vegetables getting larger and ripening is sheer pleasure, especially for children excitedly seeing their own growth stages. Enjoying the fruits of labor in a dish cooked at home and arrogantly proclaiming it to be their own work brings immense joy to the young ones.

Training opportunities also involve making decisions, learning the pitfalls of over or under nourishment/inputs, getting to guard on future risks, taking responsibility for oversight, and documenting the process.

The process of recycling and composting

Recycling is a three-part rule of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The training here at a household level for children is in all three sections. Reducing the use over all levels is an essential education in this consumption-intensive care and a need in the pandemic times. Children's careful attention in the amount of water they handle for brushing, bathing, having clothes clean to decrease the washing cycle, eating the food on the plate to minimize wastage, managing and using shoes for a longer time, and many such choice areas are important education.

For younger children, think of having them label and paint the bins. For instance, spell out and color labels for each section like plastic, metal, glass, and paper. Then paint color, and cut out samples of each section. For example, for glass, it could be glass containers and bottles. The entire drill gives important knowledge towards separation, grouping, organization, and a keen knowledge of both ownership and responsibility.

This is a simple follow-up to green gardening. The simple loop is phenomenal – vegetable gardens require fertilizers, the fruits and vegetable peels need control, and are very compostable, creating the required fertilizer.

With climate modification and pollution over-treatment, recycling is a system that is already being taught probably in classes. Practicing the same at house will create a life-long habit of recycling and saving.

Composting can be made even in our kitchen, deck, terrace or roof if we do not have a yard or free outside space. The method leverages separation of compostable garbage into dry and wet waste and alternate layering of both in a box with ventilation slots. This requires to be kept moist and more dry garbage can be added in case of foul smell. Once the box is full, let it stand for a few weeks till it changes into a brown dirt-like texture with no offensive smell.

Studying for kids is the choice making, general information, environment awareness, staying consistent in a process, observing closely, and studying to deal with foul and offensive tasks for greater advantage.

Scavenger hunting

A scavenger hunt leads to mind a large engagement area usually outdoors, yet our homes can be enough for younger children. The method of excelling in a scavenger hunt awakens many of the human qualities that have made us the principal species of the popular era – curiosity, reasoning and winning over the environment are the most prominent ones. Of course, the entertaining part of the hunt cannot be emphasized enough.

Two potential hunts that can be entertaining for 3 to 12-year olds are listed below:

  1. Ball Hunt: Get six balls of any size. Hide them in separate rooms in both simple and tough to find positions. This will also depend on the years of the child. Set a great prize for achieving the task in designated term and blow the start signal. If the children are older and you are practicing marbles, then the hunt can also hold clues to the hiding points given before-hand in simple word or slightly cryptic construction.
  2. Picture Hunt: Give your kids a list of illustrations or photos and ask them to follow and collect similar items throughout the home. Nothing too difficult, everyday items like a pencil, a toothbrush, and a comb would do.

This model's variation would involve creating boxes of various colours and asking children to locate different things around the apartment that belong to that colour line. For instance, ask the children to find blue things to be filled in the blue case.

The education here involves reading skills, the method of sifting, and being thorough, so the same spot does not have to be redone, placing things back after throwing them, deciphering clues, connections, etc.

Begin a YouTube Channel

We are in a perceptible world and the art of performance has become one of the essential skills. Getting children to start their own YouTube channel could even be a source of a lucrative career for some gifted kids, and for others, the method can be experiential, with limitless learning.

Guidance to start a YouTube channel are accessible as YouTube videos, and the method is easy to follow and complete.

Children can showcase their art and crafts skill, dancing, singing, acting, cooking, and even landscaping. In addition to setting their showcased skill, the children also become specialists in the usage of YouTube and videos. They study lighting, sound condition, editing, subtitling, and unique effects. Older children also begin to get copyright and support of social media to improve their content.

A parent must be included in such activities to control them and limit undesired exposure.

Help neighborhood senior citizens

Being of help to others is possibly the best lesson towards permanent happiness and progress. This is all the more relevant in this nuclear family time when the habit of empathizing and attending with ‘actual deeds’ and not just lip set escapes the knowledge graph of kids.

Social distancing measures will have to be put in mind when we start on this activity. This activity's opening point is to create a list of 5 seniors that the kids will talk with twice a week. This twice-weekly meeting and conversation with senior citizens will show to be pleasurable for elders and teach understanding, perseverance, and focus in kids.

The education for the kids include communication skills, listening, problem-solving, and empathizing. Learning enhancement will be visible with their communication with seniors, where many interesting, modern affairs topics, old fables, and history may get treated as part of the method.

I hope you experience implementing at least one of these plans. Do share your own expertise and ideas.

Cathy Dehart is a writer based in Austin, Texas. For more of her work, you can find at China Lithium Ion golf cart battery factory website. Headquartered in Huizhou, JBbattery is a professional custom lithium ion golf cart battery pack manufacturer.

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