CARE ABOUT KIDS

Parents: The visual arts interpret and reflect life. Through studying art, children gain valuable insights about the world along with knowledge and skills they can use throughout their lives. Art education-appreciation courses, hands-on-classes, museum visits and parent-assisted activities-helps children develop their own creative skills and understand the artistic work of others.To educate children, parents along with teachers and museum professionals must keep in mind each student's interests as well as his intellectural, social and esthetic maturity. The instruction should be interesting in order to stimulate intellectual growth.MY WORD: Children are naturally creative. Some display it more than others.
Their exposure to the arts adds to their total education experience.

CARE ABOUT KIDS

Parents: Children can be led to act out anger through stories, pictures, toys, and clay.As children learn to express emotions and ideas, awareness of themselves and their environment grows. Sometimes parts of a puzzle, a toy house, or a build-it-yourself locomotive or truck do not come together in the way a child planned. When this happens, the child sifts and sorts and changes some of the parts to see if he can make the object work through a different arrangement. MY WORD: Play is the beginning of a child's work world.In time he carries his ideas into the real world with other children.

CARE ABOUT KIDS

Parents: Acquiring knowledge about adult professions helps a child understand obligations and relationships to others. For example, a fireman fights fires; he saves people and buildings; he is a hero whom people look up to and need. Then children gradually come to realize that, for example, a father cannot be a father without a child, that teachers need students, and that doctors have patients. Understanding this network of obligations, expectations, and associations helps a child learn how to get along with others. Without conscious effort, she begins to build concepts or ideas, fitting what she knows with what she learns from other people.MY WORD:Parents are the most important role model in a child's life.

CARE ABOUT KIDS

Parents: A preschooler tends to think in terms of herself living in her own world, she may not realize that other people think and feel differently. She thinks a doll, even when facing in a direction different from hers, sees the same view that she sees. A 4-year-old can tell you what a plane looks like from the side (because that's how she has usually seen it in pictures) but not from other angles. Each time a child learns something, the information is stored in her memory. the mind sorts what has been learned and finds ways to use it. The older a child becomes, the longer she can store facts, lists, instructions, words, plans, images along with other information and ideas in her memory.MY WORD: Observing the growth of a child is as rewarding as reading an intriguing book or watching a dramatic film.