The parenting journey: Your five-year-old preschooler

A delightful age!

At this phase, your child tends to be reliable, stable, and well-adjusted. Secure within himself; he is calm, friendly, and not too demanding. He returns to the spirit of cooperation and desire for the approval of others witch he showed at three, only on a higher level. Five is a remarkable balance of qualities contained in one all-inclusive package.

Your child is now so ripe for learning!

       School begins at home  

                                      

A child who enters first grade with a large repertoire of basic learning skills will learn more rapidly, and is the more likely to succeed in school as well as in life.

How can you teach your child those skills so he’ll have the best possible start?

The more intellectual stimulation you can give your child in the first five years of his life, without pushing or pressuring, the brighter and more intelligent he will become as an adult.

Teaching your child to think:

“We do not think unless there is some difficulty or problem we are confronted with.”

There are three steps in the thinking process:

1.     A problem or a difficulty in your life

2.     A hypothesis or idea that will solve the problem

3.     The conclusion or solution to the problem

Teaching logical and analytical thinking:

“Many persons are not very powerful thinkers because they have had little firsthand experiences. Their minds are full of the opinions and thoughts of others, instead of opinions and thoughts originated within themselves.”

• Self-discovery: Give your child the opportunity to experience things for himself.  When  he  is  confronted  with  a  problem, give  him  the  chance  to  think and  try until  he figures it  out  by himself. 
• Educational games: Let your child’s abstract thinking arise out of concrete experiences.
• Explain key concepts which will help him understand multiple phenomenons around him: gravity, friction…

          Teaching intuitive and imaginative thinking:

Teaching your child to be creative, is giving him a chance to increase his self-confidence, his sensitivity, his awareness, his originality, and his power of flexibility.

How can you encourage his creativity and help him develop his imagination?

• Provide unstructured materials: Paper, crayons, paint, clay, play dough, collage, Legos… None of these materials has any structure in itself; it is the mind of your child which creates the structure.
• Let him express freely his feelings: It is through his feelings that a child or an adult has an access to his unconscious mind. And from the unconscious mind come the creative hunches and ideas.
• Read to him books and stories of fantasy, music, dance, and art. You can make it more fun and interesting by telling the first part of a story and let him supply the ending, or show him a certain picture and incite him to imagine the story behind it.

Stimulate your child’s language development

Children can be mature enough to learn to read as early as age four!

How to gradually proceed?

• Read to him as many books and stories as possible
• Teach him to draw alphabets: show him how to write his name…
• Teach him to make his own books: let him chose the subject and the tittle, and write down whatever he says. Each page shall have one sentence on it; you can also glue pictures, and don’t forget to put your child’s name on the cover as the author. After finishing it, read it to him, and don’t criticize his work. This activity will build your child’s self-confidence in oral and written language. When he masters the idea, he can write his own books without your help.
• Arouse his curiosity about words and their meaning: point out to him, on the street for example, what’s written on different signs, or in the supermarket on packages… Read the word to him and tell him what it means, it will not be long before he will start asking you what a word says.
• Provide papers, pen, books, paint, whiteboard… if you want your child to be successful at school, you should be implicated with him. Provide a stimulating environment and teach him daily in a fun and adventurous way.

Mathematics stimulation for your child

         Teaching your child to count:

It is not merely teaching him to recite from one to twelve, but to understand concretely the meaning of each number.

You’ll need materials like buttons or blocks: Put, for example, three buttons in front of him and start counting with him the number of buttons. Help him at first and then let him try it alone. Repeat it several times before increasing the number of buttons.

Praise him but don’t force him, take it as a game. Whenever you have the opportunity to play the counting game with other materials, take it. Add new twists to the game, like putting every piece counted in a pile, picking a specific number of buttons from a bunch of buttons…

Learning the number symbols:

Write the number symbols in a large piece of cardboard and hang it in his room. Help him to learn to identify the symbols and then to write them himself. It would be helpful to provide a concrete wooden or plastic numbers to work with. Note that writing the number symbols might be harder than the alphabets for a four-year-old child.

 Be gentle and patient!  

Important points!

1. When a child indicates lack of interest in any intellectual game or activity, drop it immediately.
2. If he doesn’t seem to understand when presenting to him some task or concept, either he is too young to learn that, or you haven’t presented to him in an understandable form.
3. Your child has short attention spans, so an intellectual game should not be played for more than 5 min at a time. Of course if your child is enjoying the activity it’s fine to go over the five minutes.
4. There is no magic number for learning, but in general, your child is ready for intellectual activities starting from age three.
5. Learning should be fun for both of you. Punishment has no place in teaching.