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Learning Tip: What color?
Any time you are with your child, talk about the colors of things.
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Learning Tip: Variety
Provide variety in your child’s life to promote brain growth.
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Learning Tip: What size?
Reinforce the names of colors, shapes, and the concept of size using everyday opportunities.
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Learning Tip: Bubbles of fun
Persuade a reluctant bather by adding an element of fun to bath time.
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Learning Tip: Soft music for sleep
Ease the transition to bedtime with some soft, instrumental music.
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Learning Tip: Play
Respect and treasure your child’s play, even if you don’t understand it.
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Learning Tip: Sort the socks
This simple activity will help your toddler learn colors, shapes and sizes.
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Learning Tip: Making sense
Support your child as she begins to make sense of the world.
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Learning Tip: Learning sizes
Talk about the various sizes of things, and encourage your child to point out size differences.
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Your One-Year-Old
At twelve months, your baby’s brain is developing rapidly. Toys that promote problem-solving help develop new skills.
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Learning Tip: Play pick-up
Encourage your child’s physical development by asking him to pick up his toys after playtime.
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Learning Tip: It's a match!
Keep your toddler engaged by pointing out things that match.
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Learning Tip: Decision making
Give your child choices as often as possible.
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Learning Tip: Cause and Effect
Toys now begin to play a bigger part in your child’s life. Researchers suggest that toys that are responsive to your child’s actions are helpful at this age. What does this mean?
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Learning Tip: Can Changing Diapers Be Fun?
Changing diapers can seem like a chore. Older babies and toddlers want to get back up and do what they were born to do—move! How can we make this easier on babies and parents?
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Learning Tip: Scribbling and Squeezing... the Precursors to Drawing and Writing
At two and three years old, children become interested in drawing and writing. They may not produce recognizable letters and pictures, but this is, nonetheless, an important step on the road to learning how to write and draw.
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Learning Tip: Push, Pull, Twist, Flip!
Go ahead, let him push your buttons…and flip your switches.
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Learning Tip: Frustration-Free Tooth-Brushing Routine
Caring for your child's gorgeous new teeth can sometimes be a challenge. Singing along makes everything a little more fun!
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Learning Tip: Let's Pretend...
Have you noticed a bit of pretend play going on in your house? Toward the end of a child’s second year, toddlers are pretending in a variety of ways.
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Learning Tip: Use Music for Math, Mood and Movement
Listening to rhythmic clapping or drum beats is a good beginning in helping toddlers recognize one-to-one correspondence and patterns. Plus music can encourage toddlers to move their bodies in rhythm, or set the mood for dancing or napping.
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Learning Tip: Terrible Twos?
Have you been warned about the “terrible twos?” Don’t believe it. What's really happening in your child's brain is quite remarkable.
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Learning Tip: "I Do It Myself!" Too Much Toddler Autonomy?
Toddlers can feel very autonomous. Reminding them that they are less than four feet tall and that only two years old doesn’t seem to help much (actually, it doesn’t help at all!). So, what can be done to foster this independence without letting them run amok?
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Learning Tip: Developing Gross Motor Skills
How do children develop gross motor skills? Researchers frequently use what is called a “dynamic systems approach” to describe these evolving abilities in children (and adults!).
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Learning Tip: Developing Fine Motor Skills
Children’s development is influenced by their physical capabilities, environment and the demands of the activity in which they’re engaging.
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Learning Tip: Tell me more
Challenge your child's communication skills.
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Learning Tip: Words to remember
Increase your child's exposure to new words by talking aloud as you go through your shopping list.
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Provide Toys in Two Languages
Expose your toddler to the sounds of different languages to encourage language facility later in life.
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Learning Tip: Receptive language
Your child can show that she understands many words even though she can’t say them.
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Learning Tip: Open the door to reading
Help your child build the prereading skills he needs before he will learn to read.
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Learning Tip: Don't put that book away!
Show your child that books and reading are important.
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Learning Tip: Read the ABCs
Help your toddler learn ABCs with books and items throughout your home.
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Learning Tip: Letters around the house
Lay down the foundation for learning the alphabet and phonological awareness.
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Learning Tip: Read it again
Toddlers love to hear the same story over and over again, and they learn from repetition.
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Learning Tip: Scribble away
Encourage “writing” by providing plenty of paper and crayons.
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Learning Tip: Write out loud
As you write, talk it out with your toddler.
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Learning Tip: Make room for reading
Incorporate reading into your daily pattern so your toddler learns that reading is part of his world.
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Learning Tip: Rhyme time
Word play and rhyming games help your toddler develop phonological awareness, an essential prereading skill.
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Learning Tip: Picture Books for Young Children
When it comes to picture books, how young is too young? Consider this: by 6 months, babies become very interested in objects—and just 5 months later, babies can respond to 50 or so words, including many names for common objects.
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Learning Tip: Talking Explosion
The expressive (spoken) vocabulary of many babies seems to explode somewhere between sixteen months and two years. While your baby may have only been using a handful of words, now she seems to be bursting with new words. How does this happen?
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Learning Tip: Little Toddlers Teasing
Are you being teased? Older infants and toddlers love to tease their parents. Have you ever been offered a delicious bite of baby food from your little one, only to find that he has rapidly pulled the spoon back and is giggling?
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Learning Tip: Conversations: Quality and Quantity
Does talking to your child matter? And how often do we think about the quality and repercussions of those conversations?
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Learning Tip: How Well Do You Know the Muffin Man?
We know conversations are important, but what to talk about? Try a song, for starters.
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Learning Tip: Where Do Toddlers Get Their Words?
Most parents wait impatiently for their child’s first word, listening intently to cooing and babbling. After the first or second word, the learning of new words follows in more rapid succession. What determines the order and choice of these first words?
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Learning Tip: What is a Speech Act?
Speech acts help speakers accomplish things in the world. These include requests (“More milk?”) and demands (“No night-night!”) from children, as well as from adults (“Hush!”). Interestingly enough, parents are seldom precise in their requests.
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Learning Tip: How many fingers?
Provide simple reminders that math is part of your toddler’s world.
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Learning Tip: Counting time
Help your child learn to count to ten.
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Learning Tip: Name that shape
Help your child recognize and name shapes.
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Learning Tip: When Do Children Learn to Count?
When do children learn to count? Research has shown that infants appear are born with an ability to tell the difference between two and three objects.
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Learning Tip: Teach science in the tub
Water play helps build coordination and control, as well as basic science concepts.
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Learning Tip: A new look at vegetables
Introduce a new perspective on vegetables that makes them seem like an earned treat.
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Learning Tip: Frozen peas
Use frozen peas to cool down hot soups and add nutrition.
