Apps for Toddler Learning

From about their first second of life, children can communicate. Any parent will tell you that babies can usually get their intentions known through crying, gestures, and facial expressions. As they grow, they will pick up a vocabulary of hundreds of words, which they will employ to get what they need or want, express their feelings, or simply make conversation. Sometimes, lots and lots of conversation.

It’s well known that kids’ brains are sponges for languages. As parents, we see this every single day. But they can’t do it on their own, nor should they. We, as adults, have a key role in early speech development. This is why interacting with our children and having them watch us interact with others is so important. This is true of both verbal and written language.

It’s not about sitting down with them and practicing reading and writing (though that helps): parents have to convey to their child that such activities can be fun. Skills are all well and good, but in order for children to accomplish their best, they need to embrace these activities. Parents can help make this happen by reading aloud, singing songs, and playing games with language—anything that can bring the spark of interest to a child’s mind will help.

At the same time, a whole other set of concepts is being developed in children’s brains as they are learning language: the building blocks of math. It starts small, of course: children figure out the differences between quantities of objects and start to discover patterns in the world around them. Later, they will start to use these basic foundations to begin working out problems with those objects.

This stems from a basic need of children to start looking around and getting a sense of order about their world. If the world is in order, then all is right with said world. Breaking things down into discrete objects and actions is the beginning of mathematical concepts. The good news is that just normal everyday activities will nurture the development of these mathematical concepts.

Of course, there’s no reason parents can’t help this along, by introducing activities that can increase a child’s mathematical growth. Art, particularly visual arts, is also a key aspect of early childhood development. Parents all marvel at the pretty scribbles our children lovingly hand us, perhaps not realizing that any creative effort a child undertakes has great benefits. Imaginations are stimulated, hand-eye coordination is improved, and overall expression of concepts is markedly improved. This is why parents are encouraged to provide as many opportunities as possible to explore the artistic process.

Such opportunities, really, are what many iPad apps can help you do. Whether art, language, or math, the right iPad apps will expose a child to activities designed to gently reinforce concepts parents are also demonstrating to their children. Using an iPad won’t make your child a super-genius, but it will give that child a variety of activities that will help build a love for language, math, and art, even at this early age.

Source of Information : Cengage-iPad for Kids Using the iPad to Play and Learn 2011