Dice - the Ultimate Educational, Portable Entertainment for Kids!Written by Lindsay Small
How do you keep kids amused for long summer holidays? What do you do when inevitable rainy day blues strike and everyone gets fractious and argumentative? And how do you cope when you are forced to play waiting game … in doctors' surgeries, airports, or even long car journeys?Get dice out! Dice games are ultimate in quick and easy entertainment, with added advantages of being cheap, portable and educational too! You can start playing dice with children as young as 2 ½, as long as you are sure that they are past stage of putting things into their mouths. And you will find that all ages up to grandparents are happy to join in. I offer below three particularly quick and easy games, all of which can be played with children from about age of 4 up. All you need are pencil and paper and dice - a maximum of 7, which you can probably find in existing game boxes around house. Beat That! You will need between two to seven dice, depending on age of players. Roll dice and put them in order to make highest number possible. If you roll a 4 and a 6, for example, your best answer would be 64. Using three dice, a roll of 3, 5 and 2 should give you 532, and so on. Write down your answer, pass dice, and challenge next player to "Beat That!" Play in rounds and assign a winner to each round. For a change, try making smallest number possible! This is a great game for reinforcing concept of place value.
| | Behavioral Strategy: Avoid the Grey Areas and Deal Only with Black & WhiteWritten by Dr. Charles Sophy
Oh Please, Don't Say Maybe!!!!Are you often a participant in an unraveling parent-child interaction? Well you’re not alone. Interactions between parents and their children often transgress before our eyes. All children's first years should be filled with verbal stimulation to build language and literacy skills. Each day should be full of discovery and offer opportunities to gain new skills and learn new concepts. Talking to your children openly and honestly and encouraging verbal interaction is a critical component of healthy and successful development. Sometimes, though, a parent-child interaction spins quickly out of control and leaves parent wondering "What happened? I thought I had this under control?" All too often origin of conflict is established by use of one simple word: "Maybe." This one uncomplicated morsel of verbiage has power to evoke quite a forceful reaction at times. “Why?” you may question. The answer is as absolute as your response should be to your child: You just don't use "maybe" word. Raising a child is probably most gratifying job any of us will ever have -- and one of toughest. We live in an increasingly complex world that challenges us every day with a wide range of issues that are difficult for children to understand and for adults to explain. The issues are biggies: terrorism, war, AIDs, sex, death, and a host of other sensitive topics that just didn’t exist when we were growing up.
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