Teaching your child through photos

How to build your childs logical & communication skills is a question that a lot of mothers ponder over and rightly so. Build your childs life skills at an early age with very simple means. So my mobile phone is more than doubling up as a camera than a phone and I am glad in a way as it just makes it even more precious. Trust me those pictures are priceless and worth a lot more than profile updates. We capture the smallest visit, activities that we do with pictures and it helps tremendously when you go click click, click. So here is the why and how we use it:

1. Take pictures of every activity that you do and how you do it.  It could be insects at the garden, a monument you saw, something you made, to an event with friends or just a simple play date. E.g. Making lemonade. Take  a lemon, wash, cut, squeeze, adding sugar, rock salt, water, stir and pour. The whole sequence. Now either try and just play it as a slide show or take prints off these pictures and use it as sequencing cards or just make a step by step picture game on the computer. You could just ask him to tell you what he did first. View those pictures repeatedly so he will never forget what he saw.

2.Make a physical or online scrap book of some of the important ones that is really close to your heart. You could also make a simple collage on picasa and just save those images as jpegs. You could also use it on powerpoint where you paste the pictures on a  slide and ask him the order.

3. Playback time with Papa: It gets the dads extremely involved when at the end of the day the child plays back everything he did supported with pictures. You’re also improving the child’s communication skills when he narrates back. Dont be surprised with those minute details he shares too 🙂

4. Teach with pictures: Visuals speak more than words and this exercise has taught me that this is so true. Every time we need to learn a topic we go crazy taking pics. E.g. We did a field trip to gateway and took pics of the harbour, jetty, lighthouse, seagulls, anchor, Taj Mahal, Gateway, etc and those are exactly the things you want to teach and he needs to learn. No book will capture this picture talk as well as your photos will. So moms take pictures….

5. Entertainment, entertainment aur entertainment: Sorry for using this over hyped dialogue from an over hyped film of last year but anyways this form works brilliantly when you need him to be quiet at a restaurant, some ‘me time’ at home, tantrums, waiting room at a doctors clinic, travel time, or just about anyywhere.

This activity is not age bound and should be started just when your child needs to learn sequencing or when he is 3 and pressure at the school level is at it speak. Build on it from today! So moms and dads capture all that your kids would love to see and experience as you know is the best teacher. So go click click, click and learn the fun way! 🙂