Helping Your Child Learn
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn logical-mathematical skills?
Parents can help their young children with logical-mathematical skills by always talking about concepts, such as quantity and time. How long it will be before something's happened? How long has it been since something's happened? When things will repeat, how they will repeat? Encourage elementary school children to improve their logical-mathematic skills by thinking about where there are patterns in the environment and in the home. All of these things really will help to build up a young child's ability to be successful in math and logical-mathematical skills.
What elementary school lessons are meant to teach musical-rhythmic skills?
Music lessons in school obviously help teach elementary school children musical-rhythmic skills. During music lessons, the children can participate in the learning of songs and rhythms, and a lot of elementary school music classes have children playing rhythmic instruments, such as xylophones. Also, in the language arts program, we teach rhymes and rhyming songs. We help kids with syllabication, such as clapping out spaghetti. This helps the child to develop a sense of rhythm and rhyme in the language.
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn musical-rhythmic skills?
Lots of parents get music lessons for their children to teach musical-rhythmic skills, and lots of children love the music lessons, but that's not for all children. One thing we can do is to share with our children a lot of the playful nursery rhymes that we know from our own childhood, or that are out there in the popular culture. An example is: “Five little monkeys jumping on the bed / One fell down and broke his head / Went to the doctor and the doctor said / 'No more jumping on the bed!'” This helps quite a bit with language acquisition and rhythmic skills for children.
What elementary school lessons are meant to teach visual-spatial skills?
Of course, art lessons in the elementary school--whether the art teacher is coming in or whether the regular classroom teacher is doing art lessons. But also, social studies type lessons: map reading, map making, diagraming in math, and analyzing stories in terms of place and time. These are all very helpful.
How can I tell if my elementary school-age child is having trouble with visual-spatial skills?
Children who are struggling in representing their artwork, or who are really having trouble drawing or representing just simple things like houses or people, or are reluctant to even try, may be struggling with visual and spatial relationships. Elementary school children who get lost easily or forget where they put something, or forget their way around familiar places, may be struggling with visual and spatial relationships.
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn visual-spatial skills?
The obvious way to help an elementary school child with their visual-spatial skills is to help them to draw. Help the child to represent things artistically and get the child to understand maps, the directions in the neighborhood, areas of the home. To aide visual-spatial skills, discuss with the child what thing are bigger, what are smaller, which way is up, which way is down, which way is left and which way is right. We can give our children specific directions when we ask them. Please go forward and then turn left, rather than go to your room. These can be fun and helpful activities for children.
What elementary school lessons are meant to teach bodily-kinesthetic skills?
P.E., or Physical Education classes, and activities both indoor and outdoor are meant to teach bodily and kinesthetic skills. But also in an elementary classroom, there is a lot of dramatization of stories, or acting out of stories. We ask children to imitate the animals, imitate characters, and recreate the actions that those characters may have taken which again teach bodily and kinesthetic skills. And of course we have dance, as there's always the classic square dancing in elementary schools and folk dancing. So there are many ways that we address kinesthetic skills in the elementary school.
How can I tell if my elementary school-age child is having trouble with bodily-kinesthetic skills?
Children who are reluctant to play sports, dance or act things out, and also children who may manifest clumsiness and bumping into things may be struggling with bodily-kinesthetic skills. And those who do not really having a good sense of where their body is, where they are in the room and in relationship to other people, may in fact be struggling with bodily-kinesthetic skills.
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn bodily-kinesthetic skills?
Well of course one of the best ways is to take our children outdoors and to stay active with our children. Play games, play catch, throw balls, frisbees. But also modelling for our children. Modelling the proper way to walk through a crowd of people. Being aware of where are body is in space, being careful to make sure that we don't bump into objects in our way. We can model as parents these type things for our children. Say, “I'm thinking about this. I'd like to go slowly today.“ That type of thing.
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn intrapersonal skills?
The age-old heart-to-heart talk with our children really helps to develop their intrapersonal skills. As they see us modeling our self-knowledge for them, it helps us to help them to develop their own self-knowledge, and their willingness to express that to us. When they express that to us, of course, they're learning more about themselves.
How can I help my elementary school-age child learn interpersonal skills?
We can encourage our children to learn intrapersonal skills by making and having friends. We can model good behavior for them with our own peers, our spouses and our family. Good listening skills, responding with humor to others and, of course, modeling that with our children themselves is very beneficial in helping them with intrapersonal schools. Make sure that they have opportunities outside of school to socialize and interact with other children.
