The word “discrimination” tends to get a bad rap. It’s actually a very important skill. Especially when it comes to your sense of hearing. For instance, I don’t want to open my front door, call my children by name in to dinner, and have all the neighborhood kids appear. (Well, that might be a compliment to my culinary skills, but that’s not the point.)

Here are some fun and easy activities for you do with your child to help develop auditory discrimination:

Infants (newborn to around 18 months):
You’ll do most of the work at this age. Point out the noises around you. Sounds have to be alone, rather than layered or mixed in with others. When more than one sound occurs simultaneously, infants cannot discriminate between them, even if they are very different noises.

• Say, “Listen. That is a dog barking.” Then, you imitate the dog. “Woof. Woof. A dog says, ‘woof, woof’”. Eventually, your baby will hear a dog barking and say, “Dog.”
• Ask and answer your own question. “What sound does a truck make? A truck goes ‘vroom, vroom.’” One day in the future when your little one is playing with a truck, you’ll hear “vroom, vroom”, emanating from her mouth.

In this stage, your baby is learning to associate a particular sound with a particular object. Later, he’ll use this skill to match a sound to a letter symbol.

Note: When you speak in full sentences to your baby, you’ll be demonstrating vocabulary, good grammar, and correct sentence structure. What you put in her mind will, at some point, come out naturally!

Toddlers (18 months to 3 years):
As toddlers, children continue to discriminate single sounds best. You’ll still need to name new sounds, but now they will readily imitate them back to you. Toddlers are also likely to ask what an unidentified sound is.

• You can ask questions like, “What is making that sound?” (a cow) “Can you moo like a cow?” “What does a ­­­­­­­­­­­­_______ say?”
• Toddlers can now associate sound with a process or event. “What’s that sound? … Yes, someone is knocking on the door. What does that mean?”… You are right. Grandma is here!” Also, think microwave beeping, clothes drying timer sounding, keys rattling in the lock, phone ringing.

Save the learning of letter sounds for later. And letter names have nothing to do with reading. Auditory discrimination is the best first step towards reading readiness.

Preschoolers (3 to 6 years):
At 3 and 4, preschoolers are now ready for simple layered sounds. That is, identifying a sound (like a lawnmower, and then hearing a bus drive past), and being able to recognize the sound of the bus while the lawnmower is still making noise.

• Focus now on picking out sounds. Make a game of it. Let’s say you are taking a trip to the beach. What are the things that you, the grownup can hear? Birds, waves, people talking, laughing, a ferry boat… Have your child identify a sound. He picks laughing. You listen for it, too. Now you say, “Can you also hear the waves?” He has to use his filters – turn off his ears to laughing, and listen for the waves. That is auditory discrimination.
• For 4 ½ and up, I love the Kindermusik CD called Ned Redd, World Traveler. Every song on the CD is from a different country, and the narrator at the beginning of each track will give you a choice of three different sounds to listen for, and how many times each sound occurs. There are three different “levels”, so younger and older kids (and their grownups!) can play together.

Here’s a track from Ned Redd so you can play this game right now.

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If you’d like to download the whole album (great for a car trip!), you can right here on play.kindermusik.com.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who developed her auditory discrimination skills by practicing band music on her euphonium in the woods at music camp right next to her violin-playing friend Gwen, while blocking out Gwen rehearsing orchestra music. I am told that it sounded rather horrible to the non-discriminating!

In my Village Classes, we’ve been exercising little arms, legs, and brains to one of my favorite poems.

One misty moisty Morning
One misty moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
I chanced to see an old man dressed all in leather.
He began to compliment
And I began to grin.
How do you do?
How do you do?
And, how do you do again?

When we get to the repeated “How do you do?” section, we stop the exercises and “beak-it” the babies on each word “you.” Beak-it? Yes!

Beak-it is a term used in my family for making eye contact and then gently touching baby’s nose, chest, or tummy with your pointer finger.

The touch is paired with language, either the poem above, or a simple “beep” or “beak-it.”

Although I can’t say I have an actual memory of playing “Beak-It,” when I was I baby, I know it was a favorite in my family. We even called one playful Aunt, “Aunt Beak-it.” It’s so simple, yet so fun!

- posted by Miss Anita, who loves the look of glee on a baby’s face during a “Beak-It! Game!”

Ever noticed how prevalent cycles are in life?  Every day the sun comes up, it goes down. The earth rotates around the sun causing predictable seasonal cycles. The dryer has a cycle.  The dishwasher has a cycle. Moms have those cycles. Even businesses and school years have cycles.

Guess what?  Your kids’ development tends to cycle too. Understanding these cycles can help you avoid taking a spin on the crazy cycle when your normally sweet child’s behavior takes a turn for the worse.

Jean Piaget, noted sociologist, observed that children’s development is not linear and progressive like the gradually rising line graph measuring a successful company’s sales.  Rather, children develop cognitively on a relatively predictable cycle with periods of equilibrium followed by disequilibrium.

According to Piaget, children go through a stage of disequilibrium when they have learned new information about the world and now their brains must “accommodate” that information and adjust their other ideas about their world (which Piaget called “schemes”) to it.  The child must learn and master a new set of skills.  Trial and error learning is taking place, which includes uncertainty, struggle, and frustration.

Conversely, when a child is in the phase called equilibrium, she is “assimilating” the information learned, having fun with her new skill and knowledge.  This phase lends itself to more ease and pleasant emotion.

As children cycle through these learning phases, their behavior reflects the emotional comfort, or discomfort of the phase.  A child experiencing disequilibrium may suddenly seem more difficult to get along with, or edgy and challenging.

Think about what it is like for you to drive in an unfamiliar city.  Until you know where you are going and how to get there, you can feel uptight and even bark at your spouse if you go the wrong direction or miss a turn.  When a child’s internal map is shifting, he may feel anxious and act out unpredictably until things become more settled.  And of course he doesn’t understand what is going on.

When my son hit age four, my darling boy went through a particularly snarky period. I sought advice from a trusted friend, who just happened to be a seasoned first grade teacher with an award-winning knowledge of brain development in children.  My lucky day!  She explained to me this “normal” crazy cycle of equilibrium and disequilibrium.

My fears of raising a juvenile delinquent were calmed. She recommended the excellent books on the child development by well-known author, Louise Bates Ames. Ames’ books explain the various developmental cycles of each age.  Once I knew what to expect, I could better interpret behavior and ride out a cycle of disequilibrium with less fear and stress.

Recognizing a season of disequilibrium does not mean you excuse unacceptable behavior or give your child permission to be a thorn in the side of your family for a time. It simply helps you to have patience and to calmly assess what discipline tool is needed to help train your child to handle the new place in life she is discovering. You can lovingly and consistently deal with the individual situations as they arise.  And when things suddenly get smoother, you can celebrate equilibrium!

More on equilibrium and disequilibrium next time.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who found that the truth about equilibrium/disequilibrium cycles set her free from fear during difficult days.

When I think of science, I usually recall my attempts at chemistry, physics, and biology. While I did thoroughly enjoy the subject matter, to this day I still vividly remember how unbearably hard I had to work because it was so rigorous. Most likely because it require a whole other side of my brain that was dominated by the artistic conceptualizing side.

However, science isn’t about memorizing data or facts, it’s about learning how to use a method of inquiry. It is a way to organize curiosity. We do this at a very young age. Infancy, in fact. When babies come into the world, they learn through their senses. Touch, taste, smell, sounds are all data that helps infants organize their physical world around them. Children continue to learn through their senses in their lives, in fact, we as adults do too.  As early as toddlerhood, children begin showing that they receive data and organize it. It could be a child stacking lids, or arranging toys by color or by size.

That is science! In order to be scientific, one must do science! This is when we ask questions, conduct investigations, collect data, and look for answers.

With young children, the best way to conduct science is to use natural phenomena. Why? Because children learn best when they can use their own knowledge as a stepping stone to new knowledge. Children need to have a chance to ask questions, do investigations, and use problem-solving skills. As adults, the best way to make this happen is to create or use an environment that naturally creates problems we have to solve.

For example:
David: “What is swimming in there?”
Teacher: “That’s a tadpole! Someday it’ll be a frog”
David: “But how does it become a frog?” (asking questions)
Teacher: “Let’s find out together”

The teacher and David could take out a book that has information about how tadpoles grow legs and lose their tails and develop lungs. Or the teacher could take out models of tadpoles at different stages of development. As adults, we help children to gather the information. Then together, the teacher and David could make a chart of different stages of frog development to help organize the information and then draw conclusions.

Presto! That is using the scientific method. In fact, children use so many skills when they conduct science. One-to-One Correspondence is a good example. Children could be counting the number of tomato seeds they will plant and then record it on a chart. Classifying is another skill children use all the time such as classifying all the seeds, either by type (fruit or vegetable) or by size, or by color, etc.  Measuring happens at school and outside school all the time. We could be pouring and measuring in the sensory table with sand, or measuring rainfall outside over time.

Using an organized method of inquiry not only helps children to develop the basics of science, but helps them to learn how to process new information. When we learn something new, our brains must process the information to put it into long term memory and thus increase the retention rate. We can teach children how to do this by using naturalistic experiences, or experiences where children naturally use their senses to absorb and process new information.

-posted by Teacher Aaron, who was stung by a bee at preschool and turned it into a teachable moment for the children. (But it still hurt!)

From the moment you get pregnant, you’re inundated with literature telling you to read to your child.  It’s pretty hard to not see articles touting the lifelong benefits of reading and the importance of reading to your child early.

But let’s face it…reading to a young child can be stressful. 

Young children do not like to sit still for hours and hours, or for minutes and minutes, for that matter. It doesn’t matter if you are telling them a hilarious story about what happens if you give a pig a pancake, some children do not want to sit still for it.  I have heard tell about children who, from infancy, cuddle up on their parents lap and desire nothing else in life other than to sit there and be read to. I’ve sat and listened to soft-spoken moms tell me how they spend hours just reading, reading, reading to their kids.  And I am thrilled for those parents, I truly am.

But let me just be clear about this…none of the Venning Children exhibited anything remotely close to that kind of behavior.  My early parenthood visions of what reading to my kids looked like soon gave way to the reality that reading more often entails me loudly reading words over a moving passel of arms and legs on the living room floor.

Now, I’m not advocating total chaos while you read.  I mean, kids need to learn proper behavior and jumping on the living room couch is not acceptable movement during reading time (uh, or anytime for that matter).  But simple movements, such as rolling on the floor or building with blocks can actually enhance your child’s learning. 

I remember my breaking point.  I had a newborn and was a probably a little post-partum, but I remember sobbing and sobbing one day after attempting to read to 2-year-old Kevin because  he would “NEVER learn to read and would NEVER enjoy sitting and reading and what kind of mother was I that couldn’t read to her child?” (Okay, from the sound of that, I was probably a LOT post-partum!)  Anyway, for a while, I think I even gave up reading to him altogether.

My enjoyment in reading to my young kids greatly increased once I learned that it’s okay for kids to be moving while you read to them. In fact, it’s good for them.  Now, if I were my friend Analiisa (one of the smartest people I have ever personally known) I’d be able to insert a paragraph here about the connection between young children’s brains, motor skills and learning styles.  I absolutely love listening to her teach me this kind of info, but I do her injustice when I try to retell it and it comes out something as simple as this “kids moving = good learning.”  So I apologize, my dummy brain just gives you the bottom line.

And the bottom line is that kids need to move in order to learn, and some more than others.  To require them to sit still during reading time actually works backward for them: they’re using their brain’s energy to concentrate on sitting still, instead of concentrating on learning the rhythm and rhyme of the words.  Let these wiggle worms play quietly on the floor and you’ll notice their love for reading time increase.

Now, in our home, the rule is that they can choose what they want to play with while I read, but it cannot be a noise maker and they cannot be a noise maker.  Other than that, they can wiggle, roll, lay, bounce or build.  And now, eight years later, do you know what Kevin often does (yes, the Kevin I had a breakdown)?  His favorite thing now is to cuddle up on my lap and read along with me!  Where was this child six years ago?  Trapped inside a little body that needed to wiggle while I read. 

-posted by Donna Venning, a stay-at-home mom who, after fifteen minutes of reading to her older  kids, will make them get up and “shake the wiggles out” before going back to read for another fifteen minutes. She can even be caught wiggling with them more often than not.

Babies aren’t born with the ability to accurately and smoothly direct their eye movements; it’s something they learn over time. Eventually, good visual tracking skills allow us to follow a line of print without losing our place.

My son Rob had poor visual tracking, and we ended up seeing a behavioral ophthalmologist and doing “eye exercises” every day. At first, he had to hold a bookmark under each line of his reading books, so that his eyes wouldn’t jump to the next line accidentally. As his tracking improved, he could read without the marker.

Here’s a fun game to play with your baby to assist with developing visual tracking skills:

• Take your baby and a flashlight into a dark room. (At night before bed is a natural time, and this activity is very relaxing.)
• Lie down on your backs. Shine the flashlight slowly around the walls and ceiling and encourage your little one to track the light. Point to the moving light. “Can you see the light? Where is it going?”
• Turn on some favorite music. Move the light with the tempo – faster or slower as it changes, or “long” or “short” to match the music.
• Sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Turn the flashlight on and off with the words “twinkle, twinkle”. For the rest of the lines, leave the light on as you move it around the walls and ceiling as before.

I will warn you, however, that as your baby gets older, he or she may demand a flashlight to play with, too, and that’s okay!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who knows that toddlers and preschoolers love this game as well.