Why Reading is So Important in the Early Years
July 20, 2020
Did you know that children develop more rapidly during the first 5 years of their lives than at any other time?
It’s true. That’s why this crucial period is known as ‘the foundation years.’
If you nurture certain skills during these first 5 years, you create a solid foundation from which your child can build on for the rest of their life. Think of it as giving them a head start to learning.
Talking about starting right, literacy is one of those skills that parents can nurture in those early years. Why literacy? Because reading and writing are the fundamentals of early education,
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June 1, 2020
Wondering how to keep your children entertained during lockdown? Here are some great children’s activities to keep in your pocket!
Many parents are having to juggle life at the moment with one of the most challenging tasks being to school and entertain the children 24/7. Having to do this alone is difficult enough, but when you have to work from home as well, it can feel near impossible. Soon those good intentions of homeschooling, regular exercise, and trying to entertain them with more creative and mind-stimulating activities than them just sitting in front of a screen, starts to fade into a
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March 8, 2020
While reading to our children is fun and a chance to spend some quality time together, what many parents don’t realise is that this activity is providing far more benefits to their children than they could ever imagine. The benefits of reading to your child are limitless but for the sake of this article, we’ve listed the ones that we think are most important.
The benefits of reading to your child
1. It nurtures the parent and child bond
As your children grow, they spend their days exploring and discovering non-stop until it’s time to wind down for bed with a story. Many children
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February 20, 2020
You’ve had a busy day in work, done the school run, juggled the kids’ activities in the evening and now you have hungry mouths to feed…does this sound like your evenings in the week? Do you often have to scramble through your cupboards and fridge to find what you’re going to throw together for dinner each night? With meal planning, it’s possible to take the stress out of food and to make dinner time a well-oiled machine. Here is everything you need to know when it comes to meal planning for busy families.
The benefits of meal planning
Taking the time to
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May 14, 2019
Following on from our recent blog “Age appropriate chores for children to help them learn valuable life skills,” we now wanted to focus on the valuable life skills that they learn through doing such chores.
No matter what age your children are, there are always tasks that you can assign them to not only help make family life run smoother but to help them grow up to be productive members of society too.
If you think giving children chores is mean or that your children wouldn’t help you put their toys away or wipe down the kitchen counters in
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As parents, we would do anything for our children, including but not limited to hosting big birthday parties. Have you ever transformed your whole house into a magical fairyland or pirates den? Have you ever had to coordinate taking a massive group of children out for a meal and then to the cinema? We’ve all been there and we’ve all done it, even when we’ve had to break the bank to do so.
When it comes to parties, costs add up fast. Our secret? They don’t have to! Here are 11 budget-savvy ways that you can throw a great kid’s party
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March 30, 2019
Negative language can greatly impact children and you as parents in a bad way, so this article aims to address why it’s important to use positive language and how to do it.
Negative language creates stress for both you and your children
After a long day at work when you’re making dinner and your children are full of energy, it can be really tempting to use words such as ‘stop doing that’ or ‘don’t say that’ or ‘leave your brother/sister alone’ but what this is doing is actually creating more stress.
For your children, negative language like this creates confusion for them. They
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March 9, 2019
No matter how young or old your children are, they love to help around the house. Not only do they feel a sense of pride from their accomplishments but they also feel a great deal of satisfaction from being a contributing member of the family.
Next time something needs to be done around the house, think about whether it’s a task that your little ones would like to help you with. Here is a list of age-appropriate chores that you can ask your children to assist with and it will help them learn valuable life skills too!
Ages 2-3
Although it might
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February 16, 2019
Understanding love can be challenging for children, not to mention for us as parents, so how can we teach it if we don’t really understand it ourselves? The trick is to not focus on the quality of love itself as it can encompass so many things; kindness, empathy, friendship, and generosity just to name a few.
The best way we can ‘teach’ our children about love is to model it ourselves and to nurture these qualities as the opportunities arise. Here are a few ways that you can indirectly teach your children about love and kindness every day.
Be a role model
Our
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January 26, 2019
It’s incredibly hard being a parent. Even when actual parents are telling you how difficult it is before you have your own children, it’s easy to brush this off thinking that it can’t be that bad. Flash forward to a day where everything seems to have gone wrong – work has been stressful, you pick your children up from school and they are miserable, you spend time making dinner that they don’t eat it, and then they are screaming, refusing to go to bed – all of a sudden, you know exactly what those parents were warning you about and
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