As our children are at home with us during this stay-at-home period, what are the things that you can do together with your child? We’ve brought together some fun reads about language and development to inspire you with the different kinds of activities you and your child may enjoy at home 🙂
Storytelling. As children share experiences and events in their lives, it helps them develop their own sense of identity, build strong connections with people, and gain confidence and the ability to communicate ideas, fostering their language and social skills. Sharing stories in different languages can also be a great opportunity to build on their vocabulary! For example, your child can share a story about their best friend to you in English, and then share a similar or different story to Ah Gong, Kakak, or Paati in Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or any other language(s) your child knows.
Read more about how storytelling can help build resilience in children: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/how-does-storytelling-help-build-resilience-in-children/
Check out this article on reading aloud: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200917-the-surprising-power-of-reading-aloud
Let’s colour some cells! Our lab director Suzy J Styles has created a fun colouring sheet that introduces five different types of brain cells and the way they interact with each other. As your child colours their way through, discover together what these cells look like and what they do. What’s more, we even have them in various languages!
You can find the free and downloadable colouring sheet(s) here: https://researchdata.ntu.edu.sg/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.21979/N9/0IEIPV
Music, singing, and language development. In the early years, a child’s brain is growing and developing important new connections. Singing is a way that you can enrich the language your child hears, by sharing familiar vocal routines, and linking them to actions! You can even mix it up by singing familiar childhood songs in your different mother tongue languages.
Read more about singing here: https://theconversation.com/learning-music-early-can-make-your-child-a-better-reader-106066
Is screentime bad for children? Today, children of all ages are surrounded by shiny technological gadgets, some of which even offer apps designed to teach them words, numbers, objects, and even foreign languages. This raises a question that is relevant for caregivers, researchers and policymakers: do screens help or hinder children’s overall development and, crucially, language development? As with many of these questions, the answer is: it depends.
Read the full article on how screentime can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for children’s language development: https://www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl/?p=1277&lang=en
Multilingual Memories. Over the past two years, we’ve gathered the childhood memories of our lab members as they recall what it was like to learn language when they were younger. One of our interns shared how his mum would make a hawker push-kart out of painted cardboard for his siblings to role-play as hawkers at home. They would learn the vocabulary of the different kinds of “food” (plastic toys) in Mandarin and sell them by talking to “customers” in Mandarin.
What about you? Do you recall how it was like when you were learning language? How is it similar or different with your child now?
Read more stories like this: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/tag/multilingual-memories/
What other activities would you recommend to other parents during this stay-at-home period? Drop us a comment on our Facebook post or follow our Facebook page for more updates on our ongoing and upcoming studies you and your child can take part in.
BLIP Lab wishes you and your family a safe and joyful weekend 🙂