Bring Up Two Sons

This is an article from Parents.com (America’s family magazine). It reminds me about some simple strategies to nurture the kind of kid who love to learn. I totally agree all of the points the author (Ginny Graves) made in the article. Here I extract some of the points for sharing and for my future reviewing. Read this article in Parents.com.

1. Share Your Passion: Talk to your child about interesting things you’ve learned. Explain in simple terms what happened and why you found it so interesting.
2. Surround Her with Books. Consistent access to books can increase a child’s motivation to raed.
3. Build on Your Child’s Natural Interests
4. Know When To Back Off. Those who have the most motivated children didn’t micromanage or pressure their kids. They let their children figure things out for themselves, while still showing their support.
5. Ask the Right Questions. If you want your child to stay excited about learning, it’s much better to engage him in an active inquiry than to ask him to spit out routine knowledge.
6. Avoid Rewards. Offering kids a prize for doing something can actually undermine their pleasure in the activity.
7. Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome.

Seterra is a quiz program for memorizing geography and country flags. It is a free education software. Current version is 2.83, which was released in August 2005.

Seterra is a challenging geography program with 70 different exercises. Learn about countries, capitals, flags and cities in Africa, Europe, South America, North America, Asia and Australia, using outline map exercises!

Starfall.com

The Starfall learn-to-read website is offered free as a public service. We also provide writing journals and books at a very low cost that can be used with the website or separately. Teachers around the country are using Starfall materials as an inexpensive way to make the classroom more fun and to inspire a love of reading and writing.

Primarily designed for first grade, Starfall.com is also useful for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and second grade. Starfall is perfect for Home Schooling.

The website has four basic levels for children of different age to learn reading and have fun.

1. Introduction to Letter Sounds
   
2. Early Beginning Reader
   
3. Intermediate Beginning Reader
   
4. Early Beginning Reader to Advanced

It also provides printed materials for parents and educators and links to many other useful stuff. Highly recommended!

My 4-year-old son loves to play bomberman game very much. We have tried a number of variation of bomberman games. Most of them demands payment to get the full version. Finally, we found a simple, classic and good one. It is also a freeware. We spent quit a lot of time to play this game together.

This is a version of my Bomberman game project which started on July 2000. I don’t develop this project in order to bring new concepts of gameplay or to make the best Bomberman game ever but to increase my programming skills and have a game project I can show to be hired. Fury, the developer of the game.

Bomberman Game by Fury

If your children, just like my older son, love to play with computer all the day, here is a cool tool that might be helpful.

Workrave: The tentative utility of this program is to ensure you to take the necessary breaks to avoid or help recover from RSI (repetitive strain injury). It will monitor your activity and frequently alert you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit on computer usage. Micro-pause is a brief moment of relaxation and rest break is a longer break away from the computer.

You can make use of Workrave as a tool to manage your child’s time on using the computer.

I have been using Break Reminder which was a freeware when I installed it on my computers. However, it starts to demand payment recently.

The animals on the underground.com is an interesting site. Visit this site and find out more animals like the following loving Elephant.

The Animals, made up using tube lines, stations and junctions on the London Underground map were spotted by Paul Middlewick some 17 years ago.

The original Animal, the Elephant was discovered while Paul was staring at the tube map during his daily journey to work.

Since then, the Elephant has been joined by many other Animal friends. You can meet some of them on this site by clicking the ‘animals’ link.

I drop by a website called FunBrain.com and find the following three flash games. I will play them with my sons in spare time.

Germ Zapper . Germs are hiding in a classroom, and it’s your job to find them!

Supermarket Toss. A child wants to buy the new Sara Lee soft and smooth bread at the grocery store. The problem is that his mother is shopping in another aisle. It’s your job to help the child.

Box Top Match. The object of this game is to match pairs of cards until all of the cards are gone.

The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting by Laurence Steinberg

I brought and read the Chinese translation version of this book when I was in Taiwan this July. After scanning the book around one hour in a bookshop, I found the ten principles of good parenting convincing, so I decided to buy it and read the whole book. Here are the 10 basic principles.

1. What you do matters.
2. You cannot be too loving.
3. Be involved in your child’s life.
4. Adapt your parenting to fit your child.
5. Establish and set rules.
6. Foster your child’s independence.
7. Be consistent.
8. Avoid harsh discipline.
9. Explain your rules and decisions.
10. Treat your child with respect.

Read the rest of this entry »

BBC Computer Tutor is a highly interactive and user friendly flash application that teachs how to use a keyboard, mouse or computer. I will introduce it to my sons. By the way, it is a good chance for my sons to listen English too.

Computer Tutor is a resource for people who don’t know how to use a keyboard, mouse or computer screen.

If you’re a friend, family member or tutor helping someone learn, all you need to do is choose your connection speed and start the resource. That’s it!

Computer Tutor presenter Amani is then on hand to take computer novices from start to finish step-by-step.

Update: My older son (now four year old) took around two hours to go through this tutorial.