The Nerds saw this and although they did not want to remove technology from Google Earth, decided to gift the cheerful citizens with interactive face-to-face play once again. Going back to their roots of hero feats, battle strategy and role playing, they created a realm of board games sure to bring eye contact and non-abbreviated conversations back to the dinner table. This created a faction within the Nerd classes. New Wave Nerds prefer technology where they can instantly +1 their friends or do status updates in all they do each day; but the Geeks remembered Friday nights with pizza and board games and cherished the laughter and original human interfacing….with no technology whatsoever.

If you are a Geek (or perhaps a closet Geek, don’t worry we won’t reveal your secret to your savvy Nerd friends), be sure to check out this website for Board Game Geeks. Many games featured come with familiar hardware like dice, cards you hold in your hand or flip over (also called card drafting in Geek Speak); and boards with pieces that move as the game progresses…and moved by your own gross motor movement, too! You can join blogs, create an account posting the Geekiest games you own sharing your own reviews and even search for a new and exciting game sure to please the whole family.

Stay tuned for the next episode where the Geeks go the battle and declare victory over many new board games that have emerged from the Austrian Board Game Academy.

-posted by Miss Jesikah, who is an old school fantasy Nerd and has always stayed true to her inner-Geek. She still does not have a phone that has apps! Imagine that

Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Because it’s NOT a workbook , spelling words aren’t learned by simply writing them multiple times in exercises. My oldest son is not a good speller. He was an early and voracious reader, and breezed over and through phonics (spelling) rules, because he really didn’t need them.

My younger son is a good speller, and he carefully sounds out words. However, he doesn’t like making mistakes. And the way Spelling Power works is that you pre-test a list of words, and study only the ones you don’t know how to spell.  To help him not feel like a failure, I need to make a game of learning to spell the missed words.

My boys are oil and water. I never thought I’d find game that would work to teach them their words. But I found one. That works, 100% of the time. Both of them.

Here’s all you need: a whiteboard and dry erase markers. We use a slanted (22°) whiteboard for a lot of our work. One of the reasons is that a slantboard (like the slanted desks I had in elementary school) reduces stress on the optic system.

The text in the math book is so much smaller than what we can write on the board. Less eye tiredness happens with the board!

A slantboard also allows children to write larger. My 4^th grader makes far fewer mistakes doing his math on a slantboard, than trying to write small in his workbook. The errors he makes on the slantboard are because he made a math error, rather than one due to trying to work in a small space. And I make my 7^th grader redo any missed Algebra problems on the board. He suddenly can see where he made his errors.

I suppose if you’ve made it this far into the blog, you are wondering where the heck the spelling game is I promised.  Finally, here it is:

• Write the missed word on the board.

• Trace around it in 3 different colors, being sure to match the shape of the word.
• Always while looking at the board, spell the word forwards, and then backwards. Yes, backwards. Really. You have to do that. And, at the same time, tap your hands on the table/desk/counter, or on your legs, once for each letter.
• Erase one letter. (Don’t erase the shape of the word.)

• Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the word is gone. (Keep looking at the board as you spell.)

• Spell it forwards and backwards one more time.

There! That’s it. My 7^th grader FUSSED when I made him do this. For about 3 days. And then he stopped complaining because he realized it actually worked.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who recommends the slantboard from www.visualedgesb.com

The things your preschooler naturally wants to do will boost their cognitive development – the growing of thinking skills, including problem solving and decision making. Cognitive development is not about the acquisition of information, though that might occur in the process.

What’s important about helping your child acquire cognitive skills now in the preschool years is that this aptitude can then be transferred to any other learning experiences in their life.  For instance, take puzzles. There is a lot of thinking involved in completing a jigsaw puzzle. Sorting, organizing, categorizing, visual discrimination, remembering (Where did I see that piece I now need?), a plan of action (Do I do the outside or the inside first?)

Now fast forward 30 years. Your preschooler has become a successful research scientist. And puzzles have helped her become so. She learned the scientific method as a child. She observed the puzzle, she hypothesized how to solve the puzzle, she tested her solution and concluded if her solution worked!

All mistakes or problems are really opportunities for cognitive development. Here’s why: Children thrive on routine and familiarity. When something happens that thwarts their “normal”, they are required to come up with a solution that is outside of their box, and in doing so, cognitive development occurs.

Take the proverbial spilled milk. Your child dropped his cup of milk. You could get mad (especially if you just cleaned your kitchen floor), but don’t. Remember – all mistakes or problems are really opportunities for cognitive development.

Ask your child to look at the spill – Wow! That little mug of milk sure spread out all over the floor. Is the puddle going to keep growing, or stop? Is it a deep puddle? How can you tell? What should we do about all this milk on the floor? Oh, clean it up? How? What should we use to do that? Milk gets sticky when it’s dried, because it has a kind of sugar in it. What do you think could put on our washcloth to get the sticky off the floor? Why do you think you dropped the cup? How can you hold the cup differently next time so it doesn’t spill? Observing, hypothesizing, testing and concluding!

Here is a list of 10 cognitive skill-building activities to do with your child.

1. Play Hot and Cold. Hide an object and give your child clues as to where it is by saying hotter, colder, or warmer.
2. Games like Dominoes, Uno, Skip Bo or Battleship
3. Cooking. Let your child mix, pour, etc. Lots of mistakes or problems can occur to solve in this activity. (Just ask professional chefs.)
4. Play I Spy with shapes, colors, textures, etc.
5. Household chores like sorting laundry or putting away silverware.
6. Ask (sometimes very silly) thinking questions. Is an elephant purple?  Which is bigger – our cat or our dog? What did you eat for dinner last night?
7. With your finger, draw a simple shape or picture on your child’s back. See if they can guess what it is. Give clues if necessary. (It’s something you find outside. It is very tall.)
8. Category games. What doesn’t belong – cat, mouse, frog, tree? Find me 3 things that are yellow.
9. Create an obstacle course.
10. Let them make mistakes and then allow them to figure out how to solve them.

 -posted by Miss Analiisa, who thinks she’s pretty cognitively savvy, until she plays the game Gobblet Gobblers with her children and loses!

Anyhow, prepositions are all about spatial relationships – meaning, where you are in relation to an object. How important are they? Just try giving your child a direction without prepositions.

You: “Go get the ball.”
Child: “Where?”
You: “The backyard.”
Child: “Where in the yard?”
You: “Tree.”
Child: “Which tree?”

See, you can’t give the clear, accurate directions, “Go get the ball in the backyard. It’s under the tree opposite the shed”, without using prepositions.

Beside, between, and next to are all prepositions that must be understood before children can make and understand patterns (pre-math stuff). Prepositions are a really important part of language development, too. Children with sensory issues often have trouble learning prepositions as they don’t often have good body awareness.

So, how can you teach prepositions? There are many (because you say them so frequently) they will probably learn on their own. But games (musical ones, of course!) are a great way to teach new ones.

I’m using the song “Go ‘round the Mountain” in my Kindermusik camp this August. I’ve put it below for you to listen to. You can also download it at www.play.kindermusik.com.

10_Go_Round_The_Mountain__

In class, we use hoops on the floor to be our “mountains”, but you can use a chair, an exercise ball, a taped-off square, a box, or other objects. Once you’ve learned the song, turn the music off. You sing, and change the words. Here’s a slew of ideas:

Jump in the box…
Crawl under the chair…
Tiptoe around the ball…
Fly above the mat…

See? Pretty easy. Be sure to play with prepositions two ways. Have your child do the preposition, like in the examples above. Then, sing again, and this time, direct your child to place an object (like a toy turtle) in relation to the chair, or box, or hoop.

Turtle on the box…
Horse behind the chair…
Shark under the carpet…

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is sitting on the couch with her laptop despite how tired she is, but who shall soon get up and go towards the bathroom to brush her teeth and crawl under the covers and into bed, after she picks up the remote from beside her and puts it on top of the shelf!

Here are some other ideas to encourage creativity:

• Make a big plastic container of jello. Add some extra packets of plain gelatin to the mix so it is firmer. As it is solidifying, add some plastic animals, small colored rocks, and other objects like corks, bottle caps, marbles, etc.  In the backyard (or the empty bathtub), provide your child with plastic utensils (yes, even a plastic knife!) and let them go for it.

• Collect starch-based packing peanuts and give your child a boxful along with a little cup of water. Show your child how to dip the end in a little water and stick it to another packing peanut. Be sure to take pictures of their creations!

• Pack a box with totally random craft items you might have around the house (just a few of each) – feathers, googly eyes, pipe cleaners, glitter or glitter glue, dried pasta, buttons, cut up straws, fishy crackers, empty toilet paper rolls, etc. Hand your child a couple pieces of construction (or plain) paper and a glue stick or glue bottle – AND NO DIRECTIONS. This is about the process, not the end result!

•  Find some unusual building blocks – a whole box of plastic or paper cups, stacks of paperback books, plastic bowls and plates. Provide a few matchbox-type cars or a small ball and watch what happens.

•  Hand your child a spray bottle filled with plain water and some sidewalk chalk. Send your child outside. Alternately, put fill two spray bottles with two different colors of water (or even the 3 primary colors – red, blue, yellow), and put an old (or cheap) white sheet down on the ground outside. Made those starch packing peanut creations recently? Have your child spray them with water to make a little magic.

Here are the rules:
No hovering
No directing
No explaining what to do (unless your child has never used a glue stick or squirt bottle before.)

This is all about fostering natural curiosity. Yes, there are certainly times when we should be right there guiding and teaching our children. But not all the time. You are your child’s best teacher, but our children don’t always require our presence in order to learn. And sometimes, when left to their own devices (with some objects to work with) they discover things about the world they might not have learned otherwise.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who warns you that the combination of child, markers, scissors and dog will end up being a learning experience for you, not for said child.

I used to get frustrated with my oldest son, who is mostly the opposite of me, until I understood how he learned and processed information. Okay, I’ll confess. He’s 12 ½ now, and still frustrates me at times, but for different reasons!

Most traditional schools emphasize reading and writing (what psychologist Howard Gardner calls the Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical Intelligences), but not all children learn best that way.

Howard Gardner came up with 8 “Multiple Intelligences”. (A theory, according to the scientific community.) I’m going to tell you a little bit about each intelligence during the blog posts this week, with the hope that you’ll recognize your child in one of more of them, and then learn how you can help develop that intelligence – the practical reality.

Spatial Intelligence (Picture Smart)

These children will tend to see pictures in their heads. They have excellent spatial awareness and judgment. They can draw what they see both easily and well. They don’t tend to get lost. They can manipulate objects in their mind. They are good at catching a ball as they can anticipate movement in space.

These children are keen observers of the world, and notice details that many others miss. They are highly visual and right-brained. They are good at puzzles, mazes, and building things. Fine motor skills are often well-developed. They are the daydreamers (with very active imaginations), artists, architects, and creators.

How to Encourage Your Picture Smart Child:

• provide things that can be taken apart and put back together
• arts and crafts kits, clay
• drawing paper, pens, pencils, paints, chalk, crayons
• map making
• microscopes, telescopes
• legos, playmobil, blocks and other manipulatives to “design” play areas, buildings or other things
• puzzles
• anything that allows them to create
• display their artwork

Linguistic Intelligence (Word Smart)

These children love words – spoken or written! They can have an aptitude for expressing themselves with words. They are good at reading, writing, memorizing and telling stories. They can learn foreign languages easily. These children even invent their own languages. They are great debaters and good public speakers – they love to talk!

Frequently, these children read at an early age. They can be what we call intuitive (almost self-taught) readers, meaning they might not rely on phonics as much for learning to read, but figuring out words based on context.  As they grow up, they tend to love crossword puzzles. They are the poets, writers, journalists and public speakers.

How to Encourage Your Word Smart Child:

• provide book-making supplies
• write down a pre-writer’s stories
• read, read, read to your child
• let them have their own library card and take frequent trips there
• alphabet games, magnetic letters
• word games, puns, silly rhymes
• encourage storytelling – let them talk
• picture dictionary, atlas, globe
• be the audience for their plays and skits

­-posted by Miss Analiisa, who loves what Howard Gardner said when asked for advice on how parents could rear successful children, Gardner replied that we should not try to make our children good at what we ourselves were good at, or what we ourselves were not good at. Our job is to help our children become who they are supposed to be, not what we think they should be.

Classic "Airplane Baby"

4 to 6 months
One of the biggest changes that will occur during these months is that the parts of your baby’s brain that coordinate sight and touch are now integrating the incoming sensory information. This enables your baby to figure out where her hands are in space (thanks to the proprioceptive system), and make them do what she wants.

With the beginnings of depth-perception, this sight/touch sensory integration means he can reach for an object and pick it up. By about 6 months, he is also able to rotate his wrists, and thus manipulate objects.

What to watch for:  These are the signs that your baby’s brain is organizing sensory input exactly as it should.

1. Banging objects and toys. (Against the floor, or two objects together.)
2. Spontaneous bringing together in a clapping motion of her hands in front of her body. This is the first sign of coordination between both sides of her body. To assist in this developmental milestone, you can play clapping games with your baby even before she can play them by herself.

Ram Sam Sam is a children’s song that originated in Morocco, and was a favorite clapping game of my children when they were infants and toddlers, especially on the changing table. You can listen to the song here, 2-22 A Ram Sam Sam and download it directly at play.kindermusik.com.

A ram sam sam, a ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ram sam sam, a ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ra-vi, a ra-vi (lift your baby’s arms over his head, or fold his legs up toward his head)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ra-vi, a ra-vi (lift your baby’s arms over his head, or fold his legs up toward his head)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)

Touch Me
As babies begin to coordinate sight and touch, they delight in “touching” games. Here’s a fun naming game to play. (And yes, babies can begin to learn body part labels, even if they can’t yet speak the words!) I found many versions of the lyrics brought to the US by immigrants from all over Europe. Many people commented that this was a beloved touch game played with grandparents, even at 4 or 5 years of age. Here are a couple  of versions:

Here is where the coachman sits (touch baby’s forehead)
Here is where he cracks his whip (touch bridge of nose)
Eye winker (touch or circle one eye)
Tom tinker (touch or circle the other eye)
Nose breather (touch nose)
Mouth eater (touch mouth)
Chin chopper (touch chin)
Gully, gully, gully (tickle under chin)

Here sits the Lord Mayor (touch baby’s forehead)
Here sits his two men (touch eyes)
Here sits the rooster (touch cheek)
Here sits the hen (touch other cheek)
Here sits the chickens (touch nose)
Here they run in (touch mouth)
Chin-chopper, chin-chopper,
Chin-chopper, chin! (tickle under chin)

Airplane Baby
At about 6 months, a baby on his tummy really feels the pull of gravity, which gives baby a strong desire to lift up his head, neck, upper back, arms and legs all at the same time, resulting in the classic “airplane” position.

Babies at this age want and need to have their vestibular systems stimulated by rocking, swooshing, twirling, swinging and other similar movements.  One word of caution – every person (grownups, too!) has a level of moment they can tolerate, and it’s different for everyone. If your baby begins to cry during a moving game, this means that the play has become too rough or wild for your baby’s vestibular system to handle, and the level of play is actually causing her brain to disorganize.

Hold your baby firmly around her body, tummy down, in a horizontal position. Take off! Fly your baby around the room, swooshing, dipping, spinning, rolling, starting, stopping as it pleases your baby. Be sure to make airplane sounds! If you would like some musical inspiration, download  Run and Jump/Soaring from play.kindermusik.com.

As your baby turns into a toddler and preschooler, lie on your back on the floor and bend your knees with your feet off the floor. Have your child place his tummy against the bottoms of your feet. Hold onto your child’s hands. Lift your child up towards the ceiling as you raise your feet and fly!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose 9 year old Rob would love to still play airplane on her feet, but at 86 pounds, would likely crush the lift-off mechanism.

Earlier related blogs:
Organizing your brain. By the age of 7.
Baby’s Busy First Month
Two and Three Months: From head to hands

Here’s a fun summer activity for babies, all the way up through preschoolers.

Get a plastic tub (the kind you use to wash dishes in while camping works great), and fill it with water. Find a variety of objects that either sink or float or both. Sponges, plastic animals, a plastic bowl, a wooden spoon, a rubber duck, a ball, a small strainer (look in your utensil drawer for ideas), ice cubes, a hotel sized bar of soap.

If you add a squeeze of dish soap after you’ve filled the washtub with water, show your child how to whip up a froth of bubbles with the wooden spoon or a whisk.

You might even buy some colored bath tablets, and let your child pick two colors. What happens when he drops in the first one? What happens when he adds the second? (Of course, you know the answer – the point is for your child to discover the “order” of the color wheel.)

Then let her experiment and learn. About the order of things that sink. Or float. Or both.

­-posted by Miss Analiisa, who at times wishes she could simply experiment and play with the order of things, rather than always having to make things orderly. Like the living room, before the cleaner comes.

I realized that when my kids start asking to play electronics too often, it just means they need a little motivation to go outside. So I have come up with a little list of things that occupy their time, entice them outdoors and entertain for hours (okay, so maybe only thirty minutes, but happily playing children for thirty minutes can feel like hours to a mom in need of reprieve.)

Here are a few free or next-to-nothing activities to get the kids playing outside:

Piles of wood.  I pick it up at construction sites (there’s usually a dump bin that you can pull wood out of for free) or I go to the back of the local hardware store, to their lumber department, where there is “clearance” wood…usually 50 cents for a 2 x 4. Here are some things we’ve done with our wood collection:

• Leave it in the dirt in the back yard: they’ll build construction sites, cities, and forts simply by piling the wood up.  The older two will make roads for The Little Mister to drive his cars on. Once we used the wood to build an obstacle course.
• Buy some cheap paint and let them paint the wood.
• Give them some nails and a hammer (adult supervision if they’re young) and let them pound away.

Cardboard:  We go to our local Costco and get these sheets of free cardboard that we turn into all sorts of things.  You find this cardboard in between the “cases” of toilet paper.  Their warehouse-brand toilet paper comes in on a pallet and between each row is a sturdy layer of cardboard that is approximately 4 ft x 2.5 ft (other brands of toilet paper have a less-study cardboard layer that I don’t recommend for fort making).  Anyway, every time we go to Costco, we get a few pieces of cardboard sheets.  Give them to your kids with some tape, some markers, and a knife if your kids are old enough, and the ideas are endless.  We’ve built boats, forts, fire engines, houses…the list goes on.   They even invented a game that transformed the pieces into imaginary “islands” that we had to jump to.

Cardboard boxes:  Another freebie from our warehouse store.  After we check out, we check out the supply of boxes that are kept near the cash registers.  Last week we snagged a few boxes that are now serving as homes for two dogs (stuffed) and a Zuzu pet.  With a few markers, cardboard boxes can also transform into fire engines, barns or houses.

Rocks: One of our all time favorite outdoor projects: coloring rocks.  When they’re young (say The Little Mister’s age), we use chalk.  As they get older, they graduate to watercolor paints and then tempura paints.  Keep a small box of paint supplies handy and when the kids need something to do outside, bring out the box and let ‘em go.  If you play your cards right and collected a box on your last trip to the warehouse store, you will also have a place to store these painted rocks.  Incidentally, if you don’t have rocks in your yard you can buy them at a gardening store or, even better and cheaper, pick some up next time you’re at a park or beach that does have rocks.

Play Picnic: Grab a couple boxes of crackers, cheese, water and pickles (or whatever your kids like to eat) and have them set up a picnic for themselves (and you.)  I have a plastic tub that contains an old tablecloth, misc plastic silverware and plates and a few odds and ends Adrienne has added to the box.  I ask them to please set up a picnic for our afternoon snack anywhere they choose. Once you head out to the picnic they’ve prepared, be sure to bring a read aloud book with you; it’s a nice way to spend the afternoon and reading outside just has this fun feeling to it that can’t be topped.

My point in all these ideas is that sometimes your kids just need a little boost to get their imaginations going. A few easy to find (and inexpensive to obtain) items are all you need to make your summer afternoons times of adventure and exploration.

-posted by Donna Venning, whose children are setting up an outside picnic as she writes this article.  Now it’s time to go enjoy the fruits of their labor….

Croquet

What you’ll need:
Ping pong balls
Wooden spoons

In its simplest form, you use the wooden spoons to play a “free-form” version of croquet all around the living room. With little ones, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination just to hit the ball!

You can also sit facing your child (with legs spread to contain runaway balls), and hit the ping pong ball back and forth between you.

As your child gets older, create a little “wicket” course with blocks or books or boxes. Have fun with it!

Chicken Ball

What you’ll need:
Feather dusters
Balloons

I have to give credit for the invention of this game to my nephew, Jared. Blow up a balloon (or two), and hit the balloon with the feather duster. Sound silly? It is. But unbelievably fun.

For older ones, place a making tape line on the floor and play with the classic rule, “Don’t let the balloon touch down on your own side”.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose own children and their cousins launched rocket balloons over the loft balcony attempting to land them in the growup’s coffee cups this weekend at Grandma and Poppa’s beach house. (Another fun game, but not for babies!)