Kids Corner Brasil » Creativity

New Charm Contest for Windy Hollows!

JumpStart — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:00:19 +0000

Calling all Jumpeez: Windy Hollows needs your help! New pages have magically appeared in the JumpStart special spell book, and we need help creating new charms to fill them. So join in on the fun as we give your kids the power to create their very own charms for all of JumpStart to share! Just fill out the entry form and enter to win our Charms Contest!

Be sure to have your kids include the name of their charm, what it turns Jumpeez into, and a picture of the charm transformation. Encourage your kids to conjure up their most creative ideas! JumpStart will choose the top 10 finalists and post them on the JumpStart blog for everyone to vote on! If this sounds like something your child would like to do, please print out the Charm Contest Entry Form and mail in your child’s entries!

The winner will be able to share their charm with Jumpeez all around Windy Hollows and will also be awarded 1000 JumpStart coins for their charming creativity! Make sure to include the email address that you use to log in to JumpStart.com so we can correctly credit the winning account. Also, please note that only parents can submit the entries, and parent details will only be used to validate the winning entry. All entries must be submitted by mail before the deadline, March 16, 2011. Multiple entries are allowed, so if your child has lots of ideas, send them all our way!

Send Entries to:

Knowledge Adventure
Attention: Charm Contest
2377 Crenshaw Blvd., Suite 302
Torrance, CA 90501

Make sure your child’s charm is submitted by March 16, 2011! Let the charming begin!

Filed under: Behind the Scenes

Help Kids Learn Math Through Music

luvhari — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:36:27 +0000

As parent and teachers of growing children, you may be amazed by the energy they possess. Although they spend so many hours playing, they still have limitless energy even by nightfall. I have had many first hand experience with such situations. I have an adorable four-year-old nephew who I love to play with. I always find it hard to match their energy.

I wish that as they grow up, I can help divert their energy to other productive activities and help them grow into a balanced person. Luckily, I found the answer and started with that project. I got them involved with music and found it effective in teaching them a lot of things.

An article I read claimed that children develop their creativity and self-expression when they participate in activities like drawing, acting, dancing and playing musical instruments. They develop a lot of skills like communication in early childhood if exposed to social activities like this. When you teach a child the basics of singing, you teach them the lyrics, the wordings of a song, notes and the rhythm to sing it with.

Using a Good Head Fake

Randy Paunch, the author of “The Last Lecture” calls it the Head Fake. Teaching some thing, and at the same time sneaking other learning within it.

This approach could help them learn the basics in sentence construction and expressing their thoughts using words.

It is easy to get children’s attention and interest with music. But it is not the same with Math. Children tend to lose their focus and sometimes prefer playing or watching TV. This is primarily because they have never been taught how to have fun with math!!

To solve this problem, I mixed music with math. It’s easy. While children learn the components of music like rhythm, tone and pitch, they are also learning the math behind.

How, you say? Well, in learning music, the kids needs to understand the combination of notes and the number of beats that it get to have a perfect rhythm. A quarter note receives one beat and a half note receives two beats. There you see. They learn math by adding beats.

Before you can introduce them to concepts like beats, notes etc, you need to get them hooked to music first. Once they develop a love for music they will have little resistance to learning the number game because that will help them do more of what they like… i.e. music… be it singing or playing an instrument all such activities will need a bit of math at sometime or the other.

Connecting Music to math

Many Studies show that children who excel in music tend to excel in math. This is because music and math are closely connected. Learning music requires a kid to be good in different component of music like rhythm, tone and pitch. Music uses mathematical symbols to communicate its content. For example, you use less than and greater than before a note if you wanted the pitch to lessen or increase. When kids interpret what is written in the music notes, they would have to understand these symbols.

But how can you teach them music if you are not a music teacher? It does not necessarily mean that you would be the one to teach them music. Here’s another way you can use music to teach math. Use children’s music to guide them in understanding letters and numbers. Do you still remember your alphabet songs like the Bah-bah Black Sheep? We have learned these songs early in our life and we were introduced to the world of letters and numbers through these songs.

There are a lot of ways we can utilize music to help our kids learn their math. We just have to be creative and resourceful. Do a little research and be a little creative and viola you will get your math and music game together. Because we know the significance of developing interest in music and learning math are essential to equip our children as they grow.

Do your Kids watch TV a lot?

luvhari — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:16:29 +0000

Creativity is coming to a slow death. Kids are and hopefully will stay the most creative lot in the world. simply because their brains have no limitations.

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But when they watch mindless violence and involve in the endless hours of video games, their brain and creativity are getting trapped in the idiot’s box. Almost all parents want to wean away their kids from the TV and out them in the play ground. If you are not feeling that way, then please take a second look. Naturally a couch potato will want his little fella to be one too but I hope you can see beyond yourself for the moment and stay with me on this one.

So how do you get the TV out of your kids?

Have you heard of reward punishment theory? According to this study, the biggest and the most ferocious of the animals tends to work more willingly when they are rewarded for for their action. It takes work and a lot of patience, but guess what? it works!!.

So instead of taking the easy way out, and punishing your kid, or just using simple encouraging words, reward him every time he does something good and ignore him when he does any thing not so good. Gradually as he gets conditioned to being rewarded for good behavior, he will slowly stop the unwanted ones.

For this to work, you will need to identify different rewards that your kid enjoys, naturally, have a different et of rewards for different kind of things. Kids get bored very easily so it is important to keep up with their wants and needs.

Getting TV out of Kids

luvhari — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:58:50 +0000

It is easy to fall into this trap. TV will kill your kids creativity, no matter they watch cartoons or crazy video games. It is very important that you make sure your kids get active and play some kind of sports. They can just chase the girl next door or the play with the dog. He /she needs to experience the joys of being out there, versus, staying out in your living room.

So try anything that you can to move them from the living room to the outside, from their room to the outside.

The more active they are as kids, the more active they will be as adults. If you do not let your kids out because you are in a bad neighborhood, change your house to a safe neighborhood. You kids deserve it and you deserve it