Blog

When we think about creativity, we often think about creative arts such as dance, sculpture, painting and drawing, but it is also possible to be creative in scientific ways. Creative-scientific explorations can involve problem-solving, testing an idea to see if it works or is true, investigating, discovering and inventing. Creativity was traditionally thought to be limited to a special set of ‘creative’ people, but we can all be creative given the opportunity.

Here at My First Five Years, we pride ourselves on having expert knowledge about every part of a child’s development. We have found that one of the most important parts of development to understand is ‘cognitive development’, also known as ‘the way that children think’.

A lot of the time when we hear the term ‘problem-solving’, our brain jumps back to the tricky maths teasers from our school days, and we immediately recoil a little. However, problem-solving is much more than number conundrums.  

The term ‘messy play’ often conjures up images of primary-coloured paints splattered on the walls and children with jelly in their hair. It can just sound a lot like a way of handing over the contents of the kitchen cupboard and its surroundings to your child and leaving them to it. However, there is much more to it than the perceived chaos at the kitchen table!

If your toddler holds a toy brick to their ear, speaks for a moment, and then hands it to you, you probably hold the brick to your ear and immediately start a conversation with the person on the other end of the ‘phone’. I have lost count of how many imaginary cups of tea I have drunk or pretend cakes I have eaten over the years!  We expect our children to pretend and expect to be brought into their play, pretend play is amazing and supports children’s development in many ways. In this blog, I am going to focus on the role of pretend and fantasy play in supporting cognitive development.  

Nursery rhymes are one of the most useful and versatile learning tools in the first few years of a child's life. They have often been passed down through generations and are one of the few activities that don’t require any equipment.  

We so often get asked as a parent, "Are they good?"

Now, ask me that at 2:30pm on a busy Saturday in Asda following the mother of all meltdowns because I won’t let my child open the family size bag of Monster Munch!  

As a parent, it can feel like there is constant pressure to spend money on toys for children. The choices when it comes to what toys are best for your child are impossibly endless, too. Is it better to opt for only wooden toys, or is plastic actually pretty fantastic? 

Sleep takes up a lot of your baby’s time and might feature prominently in your thoughts, as well meaning friends and family offer advice about your sleep and about your baby’s sleep. In this blog, we will explore some of what is known about your newborn baby’s sleep.

The great outdoors is a fantastic learning resource for young children, which can help them learn across many areas of their development. Water is a great tool to help with development and discoveries in many aspects of learning, including cognitive development.

Newborn babies just seem to cry, eat and sleep, don’t they? We know children learn a lot during the first five years of their life, and we are here to help you enjoy, support and follow your child’s individual journey. But does your newborn know more than they can show you?
In this blog, we will briefly explore some of what researchers think newborn babies know and what this tells us about how they learn.