Child Development Activities for Parents

A child learns fastest in the first five years of his life. As the kid’s body develops during this time, it creates more than 700 neural connections every second. All these connections impact the personality of the child as he grows up to be a student and then a man, making it the most important part of his development.

When you talk to a kid, his eyes just light up as he is absorbing new knowledge and things the world is made up of. This new knowledge gets registered to his brain adding to his learning. This development in kids is also known as brain building. Hence parents should involve in child development activities with their toddlers.

Table of Content

• Role of parents in child development
• Child development activities for parents
  • Indulge in sensory games
  • Count and measure things
  • Label toys, groceries, and daily use stuff
  • Organize terrific game hunts
  • Help them discover the neighborhood
  • Sing melodies to enrich vocabulary
  • Play creative games

Role of Parents in Child Development

For the first crucial five years, the child stays under the care of parents who play with them to keep engaged and happy. Parents have to actively, participate in games and activities to expose the kids to new senses. This results in the holistic development of your toddlers.

Mother is the first teacher of a student as she introduces sensory knowledge to her kid early on. Father teaches them to walk and play around with stuff through toys and stuff. This brings in the sense of safety and curiosity as to how things are built and what is inside them. That is what makes kids break the toys to understand the basic composition of things and calm their curiosity.

Child Development Activities for Parents

Let’s look at what all kinds of development activities parents must do along with their kids.

Indulge in sensory games

Toddler loves to touch and feel things, to understand the world around them. They love to observe things by smelling them too. They want to chew on things they find lying on the ground or across the floor. These are sensory feelings to know the world around you.

In order to enable your younger one, to recognize words and numbers, this is a developmental activity you can get into. As parents, you need to develop great levels of creativity to help your kids learn things faster.

You can come up introducing your kids to the five senses like:

Sound

Play some good classical music that will help you to relax or play with toys that make some sound. Shoes that have a squeaky voice and lights coming through them whenever the kids place a leg are good choices.

Sight

Show them different colored toys, dresses, wall hangings to awake their interest in the colors. The dresses they wear should be colorful to brighten their mood.

You then have to read out alphabets, words, and numbers aloud so that they are able to recognize and read alphabets. Across billboards, hoardings, newspapers, cartoon magazines, etc.

Smell

Taking them to a kitchen or a garden where they can smell the flowers and the different fragrances will help them register and trigger the senses for the smell.

Feel

Toys are the best thing for this as toddlers would get a feel of the structure first hand. You should be with them when they play with their toys s that they don’t start biting on them.

You can use a darker marker to just trace the letters of alphabets and numbers. You can then ask the toddlers to fill these with Chocó-cookies, pasta or potato flakes. This is a fun activity that can help them understand the shape of alphabets and numerals too.

Taste

Trying out different types of meals as suggested by doctors would get them to register the tastes in mind.

Count and Measure Things

You can use these exciting ways to help your kid learn how to count or measure things. You know that the foot ruler is the most common instrument to measure stuff. But that can get a little boring for your toddlers.

Make your little one lie down on the grass and make the count apples that lie next to her. Or from those apples that have fallen from the tree, ask her to stack them up and ask her if she measures the apple’s height.

Using a similar style, you can help your child discover how many wooden blocks wide the fridge is. Or determine how many inches tall the couch is. This activity can add to the fun. Ask her to arrange all her books on the bed and see if they will cover the entire bed. Make the kid count objects as well. Soon the child will discover how to measure the height, width, and length of several objects.

Label Toys, Groceries, and Daily use Stuff

In order to teach your little one, how to be more organized in life, this is the technique you can adhere to. Make him label his toys, baskets or even fruits kept on the table. He can use fun symbols, words or even pictures to represent several objects.

You can help him with the words that need to be written across each food product. Say, for instance, spell out ‘Jellybeans’ and ask him how he can label it on his own. You can give ‘toy train’ and ask him to recognize the object where the labels need pasting into. This method can introduce your toddler to newer words or phrases. The technique also inculcates the habit of being neat and organized, at a very young age.

In order to add to the fun, you can cut out labels and have markers to write to them using different font sizes. Or have these printed using color printers too.

Organize Terrific Game Hunts

You can secretly hide oranges or apples. Or place socks in a closed cabinet. You can pretend as if you are not able to locate each of them. Children are naturally good at investigating or exploring stuff. You can then ask the kid where the oranges or apples are. You can hide your girl’s Barbie dolls inside the refrigerator. And ask her where the dolls are kept. This activity of finding or discovering stuff kept at home can help your child recognize where things have to be kept. You can also organize a scavenger hunt on an excursion trip where all of you hide at several places and the child locates each one of you. Their sensory skills, motor skills, reasoning abilities, and intuitive skills can improve by a great deal, by this particular activity.

Help them Discover the Neighborhood

Parents shuttle multiple jobs in order to feed their families. But at the same time, it is their responsibility to teach values, social norms and various other nitty-gritty of life. These child development activities for parents are a must-have as they can keep their toddlers, happy, healthy and engaged.

Now comes the time for the kid to get out of the house and explore the neighborhood. You can pass by the local police station, fire station, beauty salon, health-care center and so on. You can then draw pictures of each of these places and label them as neighborhood cards.

Educate your child about who works in each of these places. Why were these centers set up and how the community gets benefited from a health-care center or a beauty salon? To know, how far your kids have understood the purpose of your visit, ask them with questions. Does a beauty salon specialist shape up your nails or cleans up your car? The kid can answer these questions and therefore get a better insight into how the society around it works or revolves around.

This develops a sense of confidence in kids and makes them open to the world around them. They do not feel shy or insecure as you take them places.

Sing Melodies to Enrich Vocabulary

You can introduce melodies from your toddler’s favorite rhymes catalog. Introduce days of the week, months of the year, alphabets, words, numerals, etc. When important snippets of information are power-packed in terms of rhymes or fun-filled songs, kids can learn these easier or even faster.

Ask your nannies or babysitters to help the child sing out their tunes. This fun and light-hearted activity can enrich the vocabulary of the kid without having to memorize everything on its own. Singing keeps kids in a good mood and their jovial behavior just lightens up the room.

Play Creative Games

Creative games engage kids most as they think of new ways and things to answer the questions. Arrange cards in a shuffle and ask them to find a specific card. Ask them a riddle based on their outing or something you taught them recently.

If you use your creativity and teach kids there is so much you can do.

These are some of the most unique child development activities for parents. Raising babies or children can be done in a fun and productive way. Remember, all these might look trivial to you but in reality, they impact the growth of the kids tremendously. You can connect with child experts for more such ideas and develop your child proactively.