What is cooperation?

~a common effort
~working together for a common benefit
~team work
~form a common association
~to be compliant


Cooperation promotes a good working environment, encourages peace, and advances humanity
In order to cooperate we must first tackle our own feelings of greed or jealousy, often
accompanied by wanting to achieve something by ourselves.


According to good character.com cooperation requires: Compromise, Listening, Sharing, Encouraging, Taking Turns, and Doing Your Part.


In conjunction with this year's KIC ("Kids In Charge") theme, we would like to share with you some tips and activities that can be done with your children during your bonding time with them! Here are some activities that can be done to help instill cooperative values in your children :)





Conversation Starters:

~What does the word cooperate mean to you?
~How does your family cooperate?
~What is fun about working in groups?
~What can be frustrating when working in groups?
~Tell about a time you cooperated with your friends.
~What is something you have to do to cooperate at school?
~Can you think of any examples of cooperation in nature?



GAMES:

*** (Golden rule to play all the games stated: Get as much as people as possible to play the games together with you and your child! Enjoy! :D )




Ball in the Blanket:

Get your extended family members to play this with you!
If you have 8 people in the house, slit them into 2 groups.
Give each person a corner of a blanket to hold
Place a ball in the center of the blanket.
On the "GO" signal ask the teams to work together to throw the ball off the blanket into the air and catch it on its' way back down.
How many successful bounces & catches can each team make?
It takes cooperation to make this happen!






Frogs on a Lily Pad:

Set up 1 lily pad (carpet squares work) for each child
Start the music and ask the kids to walk around like musical chairs
When the music stops pick a pad to leap too
Start the music again, but remove a lily pad each time
Each time the music stops everyone should work together to find a lily pad to be on
As long as part of their body is touching the lily pad the "frog" is safe
No matter how many frogs end up each pad they need to work together to make room for all
As you continue playing have the frogs leap, skip, hop, and "swim" to the music.
When the music stops, how few pads can people manage to fit on if they work cooperatively?





Stand Up:

It only takes two to play this game!
Sit back to back with a partner.
Link elbow and work together to stand up.
Ask your child questions on solutions to help the both of you to complete the process! This can help to promote your child's problem solving skills as well. It takes two to cooperate in order for things to work! :)




Balloon City:

Place a large number of balloons in a small area.
The challenge is to keep them all in the air any way they can without holding them.
No hands! Takes lots of cooperation!




STORY TELLING:

Apart from games, you could also make a trip to the library together with your child to search and read wonderful books that talks about cooperation such as "The Little Red Hen" and "3 Little Pigs". These books demonstrates a lot of cooperative values and educate your child on the results of being cooperative with one another :)

Little Red Hen :)

Hope you will enjoy doing these activities with you children! Have fun! :D

Credits to: http://www.abcand123learning.com/2009/03/life-skills-lessons-cooperation.html

Building Character and Bonding through Reading

Objectives:

• Be aware of the importance and benefits of bonding with your child
• Character education through stories
• Bonding through reading
• Tips to select books, read to child and encouraging reading

Bonding:

Between parents and child

• Forming a mutual emotional attachment
• Giving unconditional love
• Emotional connection of development
• Establishment of emotional intimacy and sense of closeness
• Transmission of familiar ties through nonverbal communication

Child

• Development of a sense of security for child
• Feel a healthy self-worth and self-esteem
• Have sense of belonging to a family and introduced to the larger network of caring and love
• Reciprocal love and concern

Over-bonding:

• Child cannot develop a sense of individual personality or autonomy, take responsibility
• Parents becomes guilt-ridden, spends entire life, energy, efforts and health for the sake of child

How is bonding manifested?

• Degree of bonding reliant on parent’s attitude and interest in child
• Way the child is held or touched
• How comfortable child is when entering a strange environment

> Child’s ability to be secure in a social environment

> Child’s degree of self – confidence

> Child’s sense of self-concept and self-esteem

How to bond?

• Interaction and show your love
• Quality time
• Give attention and teach
• Mutual respect
• Allow choices
• Know when to let go

Obstacle to bonding:

• Unhealthy pregnancy
• Extreme discomfort during delivery
• Premature birth
• Sickly child
• Child’s behavior
• School-related problems
• Special needs
• Marital warfare
• Child seeking independence and autonomy

Benefits of bonding:

• Allow child to thrive
• Secure bond reflects

> How well child does in school

> How child builds relationships with friends

> How child reacts to stressful or new situations

• Learn to be self-reliant
• Enjoy peer relationships
• Influences attendance and achievement in school
• Creates within child sense of confidence and positive attitude
• Life lasting effect on child
• Sociable and gregarious vs antisocial, withdrawn, hostile and aggressive

Parent-Child Bonding:

Paternal

• Many ways to bond
• 25% stay home dads
• Get an early look
• Bond by age 7, children more likely to have successful marriages, obtain higher education
• Strong paternal bond improved academic performance, fostered closer relationships and created better physical health

Maternal

• During pregnancy
• Interaction before birth
• During routine care
• Bonding may be delayed
• Child reaps lifelong effects

> More self-confidence, leads to better school performance, forming more meaningful and lifelong relationships, less substance abuse or unlawful acts

Ways to improve bonding:

• Relax with child on your lap
• Physical touch
• Talking with eye contact
• Set realistic expectations
• Speak respectfully in a loving and caring manner
• Play and tickle
• Listen with empathy and understand
• Be supportive
• Give space for child to grow
• Unconditional love, guidance and support

Character education through stories:

• Knowing the good, desiring the good and doing the good
• Telling stories recognized as important part of healing, self-knowledge and imparting knowledge
• Stories influence behavior and shape culture with shared meaning and values – fables, natural, cultural, history
• Psychologists – good way to teach children realistic thinking, as stories can show children how people realistically solve their problem
• Effective in influencing how children think and behave because they like to hear or read them over and over again. Combined with their imaginations, stories influence their thinking
• Reading aloud stories can create emotional attachment to goodness, a desire to do the right thing
• Stories provide wealth of examples that are often missing from child’s day to day environment
• Stories familiarize children with codes of conduct they need to know
• Stories help them make sense of life
• Explain differences between right and wrong cannot touch children on the level where it matters – the level of imagination
• Imagination = “image” – a mental picture

> Picture or image moves moral principle into action

Teaching values:

Toddlers

• Early language acquisition stage
• Forming self-concept
• Parallel play without interruption
• 
  

3-5 year olds

• Increasing aware of environment
• More social and concerned about friendship
• Dramatic play to distinguish between reality and imagination

5-7 year olds

• Able to generalize, reason, engage in abstract thinking
• Increase in understanding of numeracy
• Distinguish between right and wrong

Bonding through reading:

• Simple way to

> Take time out and focus on the family

> Establish strong and nurturing bond

> Accomplish quality communication and enjoy bond

• · Enriches quality time – read bedtime story
• Gives parents opportunity to forge secure and loving bond

Benefits of reading aloud:

• Best tool for bonding and opens up the world to child
• Promotes knowledge and education
• Priced strong, positive influence and build a foundation for a lifetime of significant benefits
• Fun – tickle, use different voices, sounds, facial expressions, act out words
• Fosters meaningful one-on-one communication
• Molds child to become readers and lifelong success
• Vital and integral in raising a reader – child learns how to read by being read to
• Reader develops

> Ability to write in correct grammatical form and understand power of written word

> Strong reading comprehension and vocabulary skills

> Ability to express verbally and in writing, more confidently, creatively and easily

> Imagination, curiosity and ability to think “outside the box”

• · Helps child to grasp vocabulary, master words and language
• Increases attention span
• Builds listening skills (force them to practice), conditions reading mechanics
• Expands child’s horizons, quells fears, exposure to new situations, teaches appropriate behavior
• Provides opportunities for teachable moments
• Picture books enable child to appreciate arts, illustrations
• Child stores information in his brain about language and words, context, sentences, grammar, syntax and the differing meanings of language for future use

·

10000 fathers reading:

• To cultivate good reading habits
• Increased fathers’ involvements in literacy development and bonding
• Reading aloud
• Read a story together
• Reading corner to spark interest and discover love for reading
• Immerse in fascination stories
• Supplementary activities

> Create puppets, masks, story cards, ABC Book

> Share own stories

Make reading fun:

• Find new places to read together
• Visit a library/book stores
• Give book gifts
• Shared reading
• Read in turn
• Sing songs, recite rhymes, play games, use different voices
• Bring child into story – be the hero, use different characters
• Get child to participate
• Choose colorful picture books with simple or no words
• Read with expression
• Hold and let child see pictures clearly
• Let child play with book
• Help child develop phonemic awareness
• Tell stories
• Encourage older child to read to siblings
• Be an example

Choosing the right books:

• Guide children to select appropriate books of interests
• Make frequent library trips

Emergent readers

• Recognize few words
• Very short stories (8 pages) with few words on each page
• Contain familiar but interesting objects or actions and are predictable and patterned eg.Brown bear brown bear, going on a bear hunt, eric carle books

Early readers

• Love humor and rhymes
• Short and patterned books with large text and many picture clues
• Have simple concepts and predictability, text includes complex sentences for deeper reading
• Simple non-fiction books, books of interests, thematic books

Independent readers

• Children have ability but not always motivation to read simple books independently
• Have varied vocabulary, text size, number of pages and pictures
• Silly books with real life context and unfamiliar words

Reading tips:

Birth to toddlers

• Sing lullabies and songs
• Choose picture books with one or two pictures per page
• Read child’s favorite books often
• Choose board or plastic books with textures or smells or that make sounds
• Engage child physically in reading by clapping out rhymes or bouncing on your knee as you tell a story

Preschoolers (3 – 5 year olds)

• Read stories with catchy, repeated phrases
• Choose books with rhyming words and nonsense words
• Choose short stories that relate to everyday events
• Select books about real things, like trucks or farm animals
• Expand child’s world by reading folk tales and fairy tales from different countries
• Look for stories that can be acted out like “Three little pigs”

Beginning readers (6 – 8 year olds)

• Choose short stories with more words per page
• Look for pictures that match the text
• Explore simple character books with bigger print for easy reading
• Let child choose books about people, places and things that interest him
• Introduce simple magazines
• Have fun with jokes and riddle books

Way to encourage reading:

• Plan time to read regularly
• Expose child to print rich environment
• Offer choices – borrow/buy
• Take time to look at and talk about the pictures
• Point out the details, ask questions
• Build partnership with school

How to read to your child

Before

• Introduce book

During

• Allow child to look at and talk about the pictures
• Talk about the characters and story events
• Ask open-ended questions
• Allow child to ask questions

After

• Go back to beginning, allow child to turn pages
• Have child retell story
• Compare the story situations to experiences
• Read slowly with expression
• Follow words with finger
• Point to pictures and label them
• Talk about the book and ask children to predict/repeat/describe

Reading milestones:

• 4 months – child listens and observes
• 6 months – child grabs books to chew or suck
• 8 months – child turn pages
• 1 year – point to objects to match words or imitate noises
• 2 years – interested in everything especially picture books
• 3- 4 years - teach initial sounds, alphabets
• Preschoolers

> Re-read familiar

> Build reading accuracy and comprehension

> Teach lower case letters first

> Do not worry about grammar

> Teach writing along with reading

> Limit initial reading vocabulary

> Build on what they know

> Give opportunities to practice

> Explore print around them