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Set the Stage for Literacy
A trusting relationship and plenty of playtime lay the foundation for successful readers.
All parents want their children to be successful in school and throughout life. While literacy, which begins with oral-language skills, is the foundation of that success, it's equally important to remember that both language and literacy development grow out of the close relationships children have with significant others in their lives.
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First Steps to Friendship
Even as a tiny baby, your little one is learning how to relate to others.
For a long time, the prevailing wisdom was that newborns didn't feel much, other than hunger, wetness, or pain, and that they didn't make social connections. So it didn't much matter who took care of them; any kind person would do. But nothing could be further from the truth.
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Let's Go Outside
Beyond fresh air and exercise, outdoor play provides your little one with opportunities for social and emotional growth.
Through physical play outdoors, your child develops confidence in herself as she sees her physical skills grow. This self-confidence can translate into social confidence: Children who feel good about their physical abilities tend to view themselves more positively in general.
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Six Stages to a Strong Self Image
In the early years, your child gets her first lessons in feeling secure, establishing loving relationships, and feeling good about herself. This early emotional development is basic to all learning.
In the first days of life, your child starts to make patterns out of the flood of sounds, sights, smells, and tactile feelings he is born with. His earliest sense of security is built upon his loving relationship with you. As a toddler, the relationship becomes delightfully give-and-take, and he experiences the bliss of feeling close. As time goes on, his sense of self becomes molded by his interactions with loving adults, and he increases his capacity to feel many different kinds of emotions. Emotional development, which is basic to all learning, takes place in six developmental stages.
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Using Your Head and Your Heart
Foster your child's emotional intelligence to help him succeed in school and in life.
You've heard the term "emotional intelligence" mentioned as a new and better way to predict and measure children's success. To best understand this concept, we need to backtrack and think about what it seeks to replace. Consider the term "IQ," short for "intelligence quotient." In the earliest tests designed to measure the hypothetical concept of intelligence, an average was arbitrarily set at 100. Each child's score was expressed in years and months, then divided by his actual age. A child who scored higher than 100 was said to be likely to do better than average work in school. What matters most about this little tidbit of history is our recognizing that IQ is not a given, not a thing; rather, it is a method put forth to try to predict how children are likely to do in school.
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