A child’s development and growth has many dimensions. Effective teaching enables children to use all their senses and intelligences, and we at Alpha Kids strive to make learning an enjoyable process. Though it is known that a child’s intelligence is determined largely on genetics, research shows that by an active participation of the child in various activities, we can ensure growth in the intellectual capabilities of the child.
We focus on 3 main aspects of their development:
“We call a child’s mind “small” simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort”
Christopher Morley (American writer and editor).
A child brain is fully developed at birth and how the brain matures further depends on the environment around him. Although a child is born with a large number of brain cells, most of them are lost after birth. When the brain learns something new, the brain cells make a connection, storing the information. Over a period of time, those cells which do not have any information stored in them are naturally discarded. This allows the remaining cells to develop further.
Our curriculum is driven to achieve positive stimuli to the brain by coordinating various activities, simplified and made interesting for a child to grasp.
Sensorial
A child is introduced to an array of sensory objects and activities stimulating all their five senses.
- Visual: Activities are centered on giving a definition to characteristics like height, area, and color, among the various other dimensions. Spatial: Focus is on 3 dimensional and 2 dimensional objects, shapes and patterns.
- Auditory: Recognizing different sounds, tones, voices, speech and silence. Rhythm and rhyme time will engage children to learn music and understand notes and sound pattern.
- Taste: Children tingle their taste buds through foods with properties like sweet, sour, salty, and spicy.
- Touch: Children are exposed to a various levels of temperature(tepid, cold, hot), textures (smooth, rough, soft etc) through interesting activities- like nature walk, where they feel the tree bark, flowers and leaves.
- Smell: Aroma’s from our kitchen (cakes, pudding) to fragrant perfumes, to pungent strong odors of coffee and the child knows it all.
Concepts
We introduce concepts like big and small, up and down, long and short, time- here, now, heavy and light.
Logical
Basic Arithmetic, Sequence of patterns, evolving their thinking capabilities through special books, group talk amongst children and encouraging them to get new ideas are the key aspects of development in this segment.
Most children are active and have oodles of energy which we try and channelize to produce effective results.
Motor Skills:
- Gross motor skills like balancing, hopscotch, wheelbarrow, kangaroo hop, walking on a narrow bar, toss and catch
- Fine motor skills include the ability to manipulate small objects, transfer objects from hand to hand, and various hand-eye coordination tasks, like using the pincer grasp (thumb and forefinger) to pick up small objects, cutting, coloring, writing, or threading beads
- Locomotor skills are those motor skills in which the feet move the body from one place to another.
- Walking
- Running
- Hopping
- Jumping
- Skipping
- Galloping
- Sliding (a sideways gallop)
- Leaping
Dance Aerobics:
Fun dance and regular workout sessions meant for kids.
Communication is the key element of life and here kids not only learn about themselves but also learn to connect with their peer group as well as the environment they live in.
- Interpersonal skills: Effective communication with others, building relationships, sharing and helping, creating an atmosphere of love and care.
- Intra-personal: I, Me, Myself- Child behavior, expressing emotions, Personal hygiene, self help, discipline.
- Social: Group activities to cooperate with one another, take responsibility, being courteous, games, working together on simple projects.
- Naturalistic: Caring for our environment (gardening-taking care of plants), animals (pet show), interacting with nature and understanding basics of nature through simple science experiments.