Father and Sons

I’ve been bragging about how my one year old baby learned the alphabet. Every father would be very prod of this achievement and believe me, I am definitely one of them!

After he learned to identify all the letters, he then learned how to write them on paper (on walls and furnitures too!)

His latest milestone to date was a couple of weeks ago. He can now identify numbers! though he still doesn’t know how to count, he can tell you what the number ‘5′ looks like. Learning to count will be his (or our) next goal.

How did he manage to teach our son those amazing skills and at that very tender age and without textbooks? I’m no expert on child development but let me share to you the things that we did… and doing still.

• Start Early

When is early? It still depends on you. As soon as you feels like your baby can interact with you, you can start telling him things you want him to learn. I started introducing letters to my son during his 18th or so month (maybe earlier).

The earlier he knows what those things look like and learn its name, the better.

• Use Props and Posters

I collect Stephen King books and other IT and work related books all lined up in a shelf. I remember the first time I introduce the letter ‘S’ to my son. I kept showing him letter ‘S’ of every Stephen King novels on the book shelves.

Aside from single letters from books, we also bought a number of posters which we placed in every door of the house and areas where the toddler often play.

We also use alphabet-shaped fridge magnet to further supplement his learnings. Everywhere we go, we always made sure that we bring along these toys with him.

• Supplement with Educational VCD/DVD

With todays advancement in technology, many information are available in many media formats. Aside from toys and educational posters, another big help in teaching your child the alphabet (and counting numbers) are educational DVDs or VCDs

Bought several of them when I noticed that my son are very interested in letters. Bought several volumes of Barney and a few special edition/episodes of The Sesame Street.

• Repetition

Repetition is one of the most basic learning techniques. It may sound boring for us adults but for a baby who is very curious about anything around us, repetitions is a superb way of retaining information.

For example, every morning (after watching the morning news.. that’s for me), we always watch The Sesame Street’s Alphabet Jungle or Big Birds’ The Number game! There are days that we watch Barney or Dora the explorer over and over and over again.

He like those shows.

• Give Rewards and Compliments

A simple smile, a sweet kiss or a “very good son!” said cheerfully will have a tremendous effect on the development of your child in general.

Every time he does good, we always shower him with compliments. We can actually see on his eyes that he is happy that because we are proud of him and what he can do.

These are just few of many ways on how to help your toddlers learn not just the alphabet or numbers but a lot of other things.

There are also other factors that may influence the learning capacity of a child like heredity, living environment, media, learning resources and others. But what is really important is the parents love and support for the child.

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