Articles

How do you feel about handwriting? Is it a traditional art or something that is still relevant today?  Our own handwriting often feels very personal, tailored to our own unique style, which makes it a part of our self-image and even an expression of our personality.  I remember spending a longtime perfecting my signature! Handwriting is an important way of communicating and expressing language, just like speech, it also leaves a lasting record.  It is a physical way of expressing thoughts and ideas and communicating with others.  When your child masters writing their name or their first sentence, they may feel extremely proud to have made (and left) their mark and this may feel like a really important rite of passage.   

When we think about child language acquisition, we are thinking about how language is gained and how it is developed. As soon as babies are born, they interact with the people around them, and their journey towards learning and using language begins. 

At My First Five Years, we believe in being realistic about parenting. We know what parents do is important for their children’s development, and we know parenting is amazing at times but hard work too. 

At My First Five Years, we know it can be hard to sift through all the information available online and find what you want to know to help you to support your child. That’s why we provide information you can trust, backed by years of experience, science and research.  

Creating a language-rich environment may sound complicated. Thankfully, it’s not. It simply means ‘a place to talk’. It's the way you use your space to talk to your child, as well as the toys, books and activities you choose, to create a ‘language-rich environment’.[1] Every response that is given to your child, whether that be a comment, a repetition of what they have said, or a new conversation with lovely words your child may not have heard before, can be defined as language rich. 

Cognitive learning is so important in early childhood, as scientists believe that the first five years are a particularly important period for acquiring information because the brain is more malleable for absorbing new information. The experiences children receive help neural connections to grow, and they are then strengthened through repetitions. 

As a parent, it can feel like ‘Fine Motor Skills’ is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot by experts, but never really gets explained all too well. You might know it to be an essential part of your child’s physical learning (which is most certainly is!), but what even is it anyway? Let’s break it down. 

As parents, much of what we feel when we think of our children’s behaviour is based on what we ourselves experienced as children, combined with the huge amount of information, advice and opinion at our fingertips. This, along with the examples of parenting we see day-to-day, has been magnified through social media over recent years. Understanding how to support children’s behaviour is one of the hardest parts of parenting, and in this article we are going to review some of the theories about behaviour which have formed the basis of child development. 

Join us as we tell you everything you need to know about social referencing, and why it could be important for your child’s development. 

In this article, we are going to focus on sensory stimuli and tantrums, how thinking about sensory stimulation might help you to support your child during a tantrum and what you might do if your child seems particularly sensitive to sensory stimulus.