Blog — Outdoor Toy
Encouraging Children to Thrive Through Creative Wellness
Encouraging Children to Thrive Through Creative Wellness
Help Your Child Build a Lifelong Love for Learning With These Simple Strategies
In today’s world, nurturing a child’s enthusiasm for learning is more crucial than ever. As parents, we have the unique opportunity to inspire curiosity and a thirst for knowledge in our children. By modeling a commitment to education and personal growth, we can set a powerful precedent. Whether it’s through pursuing further education ourselves or creating enriching environments at home, our actions speak volumes. Here are a few strategies to try when you’re ready to get started.
Model Your Own Thirst for Knowledge
Fostering a love for learning in your children is a rewarding journey that begins with your own educational pursuits. By embracing your curiosity and enthusiasm for knowledge, you set a powerful example for your children. If you’re interested in learning about human behavior and want access to a wealth of career options, pursuing an online psychology degree offers the flexibility to balance your aspirations with family responsibilities. This not only enhances your career prospects but also demonstrates the value of lifelong learning to your children, encouraging them to embrace curiosity and growth. Take a look at the requirements for a psychology degree online to find out when you can get started.
Create a Sense of Structure
Creating a daily routine that balances structured activities with unstructured time is key to nurturing a child’s passion for learning. Establishing regular wake and sleep times, along with meal rituals, provides a stable framework that promotes healthy habits. Allowing children the freedom to choose activities like reading or drawing during unstructured time fosters independence and creativity. This approach helps them develop a broad skill set while looking forward to learning time rather than dreading it.
Encourage Educational Trips
Regular visits to local museums, libraries, or science centers can significantly nurture your child’s curiosity and love for learning. These outings offer opportunities for children to engage with new concepts in an interactive environment. By interacting with exhibits, children can delve into subjects like electricity and magnetism in a hands-on way, which is often more impactful than traditional classroom learning. Encouraging these experiences can foster a lifelong passion for discovery and learning.
Let Them Help In The Kitchen
Engaging your children in cooking activities is a wonderful way to nurture their love for learning while teaching them essential skills. By involving them in the kitchen, you provide a hands-on experience that is both educational and enjoyable. Measuring ingredients helps children grasp concepts of fractions and volumes, while following a recipe enhances their ability to follow sequential steps. Additionally, cooking introduces them to the science of how ingredients interact, offering a practical application of chemistry concepts. This approach not only equips them with valuable life skills but also fosters a love for learning through everyday activities.
Give Them The Power Of Choice
Empowering children to choose their own books can greatly enhance their engagement and autonomy in reading. When kids select books that align with their interests, reading becomes a delightful activity rather than a chore. Research shows that self-selection of reading materials not only makes the experience more enjoyable but also aligns with their curiosity, fostering a deeper connection with the text. Encouraging children to explore libraries or online platforms to ‘shop’ for books supports their independence and helps develop critical decision-making skills.
Go Digital
To cultivate a lifelong love of reading in your children, consider integrating interactive e-books and audiobooks into their daily routine. These tools can often be found online for free and can transform reading into an engaging and accessible activity, accommodating various reading abilities. By incorporating audio elements like multiple voices and sound effects, stories become more vivid and captivating, enhancing both interest and comprehension. Additionally, using audiobooks at home or in the classroom can introduce children to a broader vocabulary.
Help Your Child Get Involved
Involving your children in community service projects is a meaningful way to cultivate essential life skills while building social connections. By selecting projects that resonate with their interests, children can learn about teamwork and empathy, and also develop a sense of responsibility and leadership. These activities offer a practical context for learning, enabling children to apply classroom knowledge in impactful ways and interact with diverse individuals, which can broaden their social networks and future opportunities.
By embracing these strategies, you can ignite your child’s passion for learning and equip them with the skills and mindset needed for lifelong success. Encouraging curiosity, creativity, and community engagement not only enriches their educational journey but also fosters a love for learning that will last a lifetime.
Discover a new way to play with Walkie Chalk – the perfect outdoor toy for all ages that lets creativity soar without the sore knees or backaches!
5 Ways to Get Children with Learning Disabilities Involved with the Arts
Guest Author: Lillian Brooks
If your child has learning disabilities, it’s essential to encourage them to participate in the arts. The arts can improve communication skills, grow self-confidence, and increase fitness levels. Here, the creativity experts at Walkie Chalk present five of the best options for children with learning disabilities.
1. Music
Participating in a music class or learning a musical instrument requires complete focus. As a result, music is ideal for relieving stress, teaching your children to concentrate, and helping them gain a creative outlet.
In addition, a recent survey produced by AARP found music listeners had higher scores for mental well-being, higher levels of happiness, and better cognitive function. In fact, sixty-eight percent of parents that introduced their children to music rated their child’s ability to learn new things as very good or excellent. However, this was only 50% for parents who hadn’t exposed their children to music.
2. Acting
Transferring energy to performing arts can be helpful to an active child, and acting is one of the best options. Your children can gain confidence, a sense of achievement, teamwork skills, and multiple creative skills from acting.
In addition, acting can boost your child’s communication skills. Around 86% of employees state poor communication is the main reason for workplace failures. Therefore, you should promote your child’s communication skills at a young age.
3. Painting and Drawing
Children often enjoy drawing things; when we become adults, we often stop drawing due to our busy adult lives. But drawing can relieve stress and anxiety in adults, so it’s a shame most adults forget about their painting passions.
With that said, painting is excellent for children. It helps them build confidence, develop problem-solving skills, create a shared learning experience, increase brain development, enhance senses, explore color, and convey individual ideas.
You and your child can also get outside to draw using Walkie Chalk. This fun modification to classic chalk drawing makes it easier for adults to play along. Plus, kids with sensory challenges can enjoy drawing without getting chalk on their fingers!
4. Dancing
Young children have so much energy, and dancing is one of the best ways to focus that energy. Dancing can enhance creativity, encourage socialization, increase cognitive development, and boost emotional development.
Dancing is also excellent for helping your child’s physical fitness. It improves their flexibility, overall balance, coordination, muscular strength, heart and lung condition, and spatial awareness.
5. Crafting
You’ll struggle to find a better creative outlet for your children than crafting. It can improve self-confidence, reduce overall stress, decrease anxiety, raise a child’s focus, and grow emotional development.
Crafting is also superb for teaching colors and shapes, encouraging critical thinking, building resilience, and increasing pattern recognition.
Design an Arts Room
By creating an arts room in your home, you and your children can explore the world of art in a comfortable and familiar setting. When designing your arts room, be sure to include plenty of storage for all of your supplies. And be sure to leave plenty of open space for painting, drawing, or whatever other creative pursuits you enjoy.
Not only will an arts room make your home more attractive to potential buyers, but it will also give you and your children a place to relax and express yourself. Keep track of any upgrades by keeping receipts and taking before-and-after photos because this new addition may be a valuable selling feature when you eventually choose to list your house and move.
Start Teaching Children Yourself
Teaching children is incredibly rewarding. You may find a passion for teaching children arts and crafts when you share the benefits with your children. If so, consider teaching your arts and crafts lessons to children of all ages and backgrounds.
You can work as a self-employed teacher, but consider registering your new teaching business as a limited liability company. It’ll offer you more flexibility, less paperwork, and various tax benefits. If you’re not sure how to start an LLC, use a formation service to avoid costly legal fees.
Get Children Involved in the Arts Today
While the arts are great for helping everyone to get in touch with their own creativity, they can be especially fantastic for children with learning difficulties because they give them an outlet in a world that otherwise doesn’t always seem to take their feelings and perspectives into consideration. You may even decide to start your own business teaching art to children!
The Benefits of the Arts and How to Get Involved
If you want to help expand the mind of your child then you should consider infusing the arts into their lives. By playing music, painting pictures, and expressing themselves artistically, kids can have more fulfilled lives and you never know where the hobby could take them!
Eight Games To Play With Sidewalk Chalk This Summer! Stand Up & Draw, Play & Create.
Looking for quick and easy fun games to play this summer? Grab some sidewalk chalk and keep the kids active for hours with these ideas.
Look Out! 2018 Sidewalk Chalk Art Festivals Are Coming in Michigan
2018 Michigan Sidewalk Chalk Art Festivals!
It may still be snowing here in the Midwest but Spring is right around the corner...
It is, right?
Yes, it is - and that means sunshine, getting outside and finding fun creative things to do with your kids on the weekends. One very cool thing is to check out a Street Art Sidewalk Chalk Frestival - fun and when you see the artwork, it's amazing!
Here are a few really great festivals happening in Michigan in 2018, and Walkie Chalk may just pop up at a few!
June 15-16
West Michigan Chalk Art Festival - Byron Center, MI
June 23-24, 2018
Northville Chalk Festival, Northville, MI
July 28-29
Chalk Art - Downtown Chelsea, MI
August 3-5
Chalk The Block - St. Joseph, MI
Holiday Rush and the End of a Memorable Year
Who knew?
Walkie Chalk is... a big Christmas gift?
I didn't, that's for sure. Who buys sidewalk chalk stuff for Xmas? Don't they know it's 22 degrees and snowing out?
When we created it, I was focused mostly on the idea of a very seasonal summer toy - but people kept saying no, it could be year-round... well, given our Amazon stock, or lack thereof, I guess I was wrong. And glad to be wrong. As the chilly white stuff falls here in Michigan I keep forgetting that kids in nice warm places like Florida and Texas can draw sidewalk chalk all year. Lucky ducks!
We keep sending boxes to Amazon and they keep disappearing, and orders coming from all over - Biloxi AL, Darien, CT, Nashua, NH, Honolulu, HI, Las Vegas, NV or my favorite Conshohocken, PA! - . It's sort of the same feeling to have your product shipping to all these strangers - as it is a parent when you child goes off to school is playing with new kids - I just want to know, who are these people? Who is playing with our toy? But THANK YOU, from Ocean City to Century City, we appreciate it!
So as we head towards the end of 2016, we're thinking back on what a year it was. At this time a year ago, we had a single plastic 3D printed prototype of what we thought Walkie Chalk could be, no packaging, no web site and were stressed about the investment to take a giant leap of faith in production.
But, with a great investor, awesome manufacturing partners, the best graphic design guy on the planet (how we got so lucky, I'll never know) sleepless nights and support from our friends, we did it.We have shipments on their way to Toys R Us, Bed Bath & Beyond and Hobby Lobby right now, and we'll be on Zulily next week.
We also met amazing people, like Choon Ng who invented the RainbowLoom (the biggest toy of the last 20 years!) and have gotten calls and emails from buyers, parents and grandparents all around the world. The same guy in Australia keeps emailing asking when he can get a Walkie Chalk!
Now, we're getting ready for Toy Fair in February with our distributor, Talicor out of Kalamazoo, MI and from there it's onto 2018 planning already. Shauna is lining up some awesome PR for the summer too, so watch out! Who knows where Walkie Chalk will go or what happens to our little idea - but now we can say we did something and it was with your help and support that it happened.
We truly thank all of you guys for the encouragement, contacts and advice - it's been one heck of a 2016.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Stand Up & Draw!