Parenting Tip #48 Yea for technology!

Yea for technology--as long as you use it to your advantage rather than letting it take over your life. Case in point-- clip art. You can find clip art on everything you can think of—animals, objects, crafts, you name it. So my daughter took advantage of all these pictures that are available and used them for a creative writing project (actually, I think she was just using them to keep her daughters from being bored—but a “creative writing project” sounds better).

She printed off several pictures of dogs, gave them to her daughters, then they colored them, cut them out, pasted them on paper and wrote stories about the dogs. Ingenious. Simple. Creative.

You could also print off words that rhyme (like hat, bat, rat, mat, fat, sat, etc). Depending on the age of your child, they could categorize the pictures that rhyme, or write a poem and instead of writing the rhyming words, paste the pictures of the rhyming word at the end of the sentence.

The computer is great for children to practice skip counting i.e. 2,4,6,8, or 3,6,9,12. One of my piano students mentioned that at her school she had to learn to skip count for all the numbers, then when it came time to learn her multiplication tables, she had everything almost memorized because, for instance, if you can skip count 7,14,21,28etc. you can easily figure out what 3X7 equals from your skip counting.

Learning the alphabet is another great way to use the computer. Preschoolers love to find the alphabet on the keypad and type them in order. Especially when you use a fun font and a different color.

I know a lot of you have used the computer to teach your children. Please share your ideas with us.