At Growing Kids Learning Centers, we offer a variety of child care programs and love finding fun and exciting ways to help children develop new skills, learn, and grow in their environments. Gardening is one way to do just that! In this blog, we are going to talk about the benefits of gardening for kids and why you should start this fun activity with your family!

Encourage Them To Eat Healthier

Do you have trouble getting your children to eat their vegetables on a regular basis? Most parents do, and while gardening isn’t going to be the magical fix, it can help! When your kids help you grow your own vegetables, they are more likely to eat them. Your kiddos will be proud that they grew their own vegetables and want to try them for themselves. Be sure to add vegetables to your garden that your kids will actually like. Once they start eating the veggies they help grow, they may begin to try other new things as well!

Teaches Them Patience

Patience is a tough lesson to teach kids, especially since they don’t want to wait for anything. But gardening is a great way to teach them that hard work pays off and that patience is a necessary skill in life. Gardening does not offer instant results; your children will have to wait weeks for the results of all their efforts. While this may be frustrating for them, it will teach them how to be patient. Your kiddos will love watching their vegetables slowly grow over the course of weeks and learn that their patience and hard work all pay off in the end.

Boosts Confidence

Growing your own vegetables can provide a huge confidence boost for you and your kids! When you garden with your child, they can feel a sense of accomplishment that will make them feel proud. Activities, such as gardening, that have an end result your child can show off, are a great way to help them build confidence. If you are looking for ways to help your child feel more confident in themselves, gardening is a great activity to try!

Engages All Five Senses

Gardening is a beautiful activity that engages and stimulates all five senses. This is a great way to teach your child about the senses and is one of the few activities that can engage all five of them! They can feel the dirt as they plant each plant, smell the scent of the dirt after watering the plants, hear the bugs buzzing and the sound of the vine snapping as you pick vegetables, see how the veggies change color as they grow, and taste them when they are done! While gardening, find different ways to engage the senses and talk about it with your kiddos!

Improve Fine Motor Skills

Gardening can also help improve your child’s fine motor skills, especially if you start with seeds. Planting seeds, gently caring for different plants, and picking veggies all require fine motor skills and is a great way to get your child to slow down and more carefully. Children have a tendency to love explosive movements, like kicking, jumping, throwing, and running, so an activity like gardening can help them slow down and be gentle with the plants.

Teaches Responsibility

Your child can also learn responsibility from gardening. Gardening and growing vegetables put them in charge of something, especially since they aren’t really responsible for themselves yet. If they forget to water their plants for a week, they will dry up; if they don’t take responsibility for their plants, they will die. While you can always help take some of the responsibility, it is best to let your child take care of their own plants, so that they learn how to be responsible for something.

Encourages a Love For Nature

When kids get to spend time outside, digging in the dirt, and watching plants grow food, they will begin to develop a love for nature. You can help teach your child about the environment, and give them a space to explore their curiosities. Gardening offers a different outdoor experience than simply playing outside. When your child is able to do something outside that really puts them in touch with their surroundings, they will begin to appreciate it more. If you care about nature and the outdoors, gardening is a great way to get your child on the same page.

Gets Them Outside and Moving

With so many screens nowadays that can keep kids distracted, getting them outside can be a challenge. Gardening is a great way to get your kiddos outside and give them a fun, educational, and unique type of activity. While kids love playing outside, gardening can provide them with a calm place to escape to when they simply want to be outside. Gardening can be a lot of work too, from hauling the watering can to digging and pulling weeds. Your child will enjoy getting outside and moving in their garden.

These are only a few of the many benefits that a garden can offer kiddos. Gardening is a great activity to do as a family and can help your child learn and develop a lot of new skills. Plus, who doesn’t love having fresh veggies every day?

While it may be late in the season to start a veggie garden from seeds, you can also buy plants that are already established and get started on a garden with your kiddos! At Growing Kids Learning Centers, we love giving parents ideas for fun and educational activities to do with their kids. Learn more about our child care programs and be sure to check out our locations throughout Indiana to find a school near you! Contact us with any questions you may have.

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Creative play is an important part of your child’s growth and development. This is something that can help them learn and develop new skills that they will use throughout their lifetime. Encouraging creativity and creative play in your young children can help them throughout their development.

At Growing Kids Learning Centers, we encourage our students to use their creative side and take part in creative play. We know the benefits that creativity can provide your children and how it can boost their development. In this blog, we are going to talk about the importance of creative play and how it can benefit your child’s development.

What Is Creative Play?

Creative play is honestly just children being children. When they create different scenarios and act them out or use their toys to create a story, this is them engaging in creative play. While children can play creatively on their own, nowadays, technology often takes over their attention, which can kill creativity. It is important for you to encourage your child to play creatively and give them the tools to do so. These tools include open-ended toys, such as blocks, clay, and other similar toys, as well as arts and craft items.

Benefits of Creative Play

Creative play can help your child with a variety of different developmental skills. While many parents think creativity just allows children to be imaginative, it actually can help in every aspect of their development.

Emotional Development

When children take part in creative play, they are able to improve their emotional skills. Creative play often leads to children making up scenarios, stories, and other games, which can often help them work through feelings and emotions. While children may not know how to express their own feelings, they may have an easier time doing it through their action figures or dolls. In our previous blog, we discussed how to teach your child about their emotions. Allowing them to play creatively is one additional way to help your child explore and express their emotions. Creative activities give your child a positive outlet for expressing their emotions.

Social Development

Creative play also allows children to interact with others and learn different social skills. When your child plays dress up or even does arts and crafts with other children, they will be able to learn how to communicate with others and socialize in a fun and unique way. Even if your child is playing alone, creative play can allow them to learn how to socialize with others. If your child is playing with their action figures alone, they will likely have them converse, allowing your child to practice conversation and learn how they would respond when talking with others.

Language Development

As we just mentioned, creative play allows your child to interact with others for practice conversations through their toys. This allows them to build a bigger vocabulary and develop better communication skills. They will develop language skills as they play!

Cognitive Development

Your kiddo will also be able to develop their intellectual skills through creative play. They will have several opportunities to practice problem-solving skills and start to learn more about language, cause and effect, and so much more. Creativity can lead to curiosity which can lead to your child learning more about different things that interest them. Your child will be able to develop math skills, reading skills, thinking skills, and many other cognitive skills. Creative play and different creative activities can help your young kiddo develop more intellectual skills.

Motor Development

Creative play can help your child develop their motor skills as well. Arts and crafts and other similar activities will allow your child to develop their fine motor skills. From cutting paper to using a paintbrush, your child will be able to continue working on their fine motor skills. When your child plays dress up or pretends to be a pilot, running and jumping around in the backyard, they will be developing their gross motor skills more. Your child will be able to develop motor skills and improve their physical abilities and movements.

Through creative play, your child will be able to learn a lot and continue to develop a number of different skills. Plus, creative play can help them remain creative as they grow older, which is a skill many adults wish they still had. Be sure to encourage creativity in your children and provide them with ideas and the things they need to be creative.

Ideas For Creative Play

Before we talk about ways to encourage creative play in your child, it is important that you try not to stifle their creativity. Parents often, accidentally, put a stop to children’s creativity because they fear that their child doesn’t know what is real. While this is a normal thing to do, try to recognize when they are being creative and when they actually don’t know. This will allow them to practice creativity and feel encouraged to use their imagination.

There are many different things you can do as a parent to help encourage and stimulate your child’s creativity. Read on for some fun ideas!

Get The Right Toys

As we already mentioned, getting your child toys they can be creative with or do crafts with is a great way to encourage creativity. Try to avoid video games and other toys that take all the creativity out of play. While some of those toys are fine, try to provide your child with more toys that allow them to use their imagination.

Encourage Invented Scenarios

Kids are great at making up scenarios as they play. Whether they pretend they are an explorer traveling through the jungle or they are a fireman saving all of their stuffed animals from a burning building, this type of play allows your child to try different roles and characters, which allow them to learn verbal and social skills. To encourage your child to create new and fun scenarios add dress-up clothes, puppets, and other toys to their collection. Let them lead your playtime and play along with whatever scenario they come up with. You could even try adding to the made-up scenario to show them that adults can be creative too!

Do Arts And Crafts

Arts and crafts are a great way to encourage your kiddo to be creative. Rather than choosing one craft to do and helping them do it, provide them with a huge collection of arts and crafts supplies and let them create whatever they want. Allowing your child to create anything they want allows their creative juices to flow. If they need ideas, give them a very broad idea rather than an actual project. Tell them to create a new animal, invent something they wish existed, or something else that allows them to truly be creative.

Explore Nature

Nature is a unique and beautiful thing. When children have time to explore nature and the everchanging sceneries, they are likely to discover new things that can help boost their creativity. Ask them questions about the great outdoors that they can answer creatively. Nature causes children to think and explore, which can help boost their creative thinking.

Let Them Be

When you just allow your children to spend time doing their own thing, without interfering, your child will likely begin to think creatively and start to imagine. Allowing your child to simply be a child is a great way to allow for creativity. Give them time to do whatever they want, that isn’t sitting in front of a TV screen. They will use their imagination and creativity to entertain themselves.

There are many benefits that creativity can provide and many ways to encourage it in your children. Be sure to encourage your child to be creative and use their imagination daily to allow them to start developing new skills and learn! You may even learn a thing or two about being creative yourself! Enroll your child at one of our Growing Kids Learning Centers locations where they will be able to use their imagination and be creative daily! Contact us to learn more and get your questions answered.

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If the thought of your child pointing out a person who is different than them is simply mortifying, you’re not alone. It’s common for kids to want to understand the newness of the world around them! However, there are great lessons in empathy that show up at these opportunities.

You might not fully be able to prevent your child from shouting about a woman using a wheelchair, but you will be able to teach tolerance with these tips from Growing Kids Learning Centers. Find out how to teach young kids about differences, and look into preschool and child care with our schools in South Bend (at Ireland Road, State Road 23, and North Bendix Drive), Chesterton, Goshen, Warsaw, Plymouth, Elkhart, Bristol, or Valparaiso today!

Give Examples

If you’re trying to avoid having your child call attention to someone who’s different from them, be proactive! Find books and movies that show great examples of representation. If the majority of your child’s exposure to fictional and nonfictional characters are very similar to them or your family, find more diverse examples.

There are some amazing, kid-friendly books that do the work of giving examples of differences for you. Purchase “It’s Okay to Be Different” by Todd Parr, “Elmer” by David McKee, “Princess Hair” by Sharee Miller, and “The Boy in the Dress” by David Walliams for your library collection.

Have Open Discussions

When you were growing up, you might have had moments where adults told you not to notice or think about other people’s differences. You might have even been told not to talk about them, or been scolded for your inquiries. At best, this breeds a lot of curiosity without direction; at worst, it creates feelings of shame.

No child should be ashamed for asking questions, especially when they have no context for what they’re asking about. Have conversations about appropriate times (and speaking volumes!) to ask questions, how other people might feel if they become the center of attention without their permission, and how you will always answer your child’s questions — it just might not be right when they want an answer.

Relate it Back to Them

The great thing about this lesson is that everyone is different! We all have our own unique tendencies, looks, and personalities. Even when your child might feel like someone else is different, the truth is that the stranger walking on the street will find them (your child) just as different!

It’s always important to focus on how we have things in common with one another, but it’s even more important to remember how our greatest commonality is that we are all different. And these differences can and should be celebrated.

Enroll in Preschool

From the books we read at Growing Kids Learning Centers to the peer-to-peer interactions we help supervise, facilitate, and use as teaching moments, your child will confidently learn how to embrace others’ differences — as well as their own. Social-emotional growth and empathy are two of the greatest and most important skills for a child to learn. Preschool is the perfect place to work on these skills, especially when you enroll with Growing Kids Learning Centers. Tour one of our schools today!

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As a child continues to grow cognitively, creativity is immensely strong within children ages 3-6. This is a prime time to develop the structure for creative thoughts and thinking processes that can be utilized throughout their lives, both in and outside of school. Inspiring creative development can help with critical thinking, an essential and empowering skill for children to acquire. It also helps with problem solving, a stimulating and creative process that is crucial to early childhood development. Children are naturally curious, and Growing Kids likes to feed their creative side.

At Growing Kids, we teach our preschoolers and kindergartens the fundamentals of math, writing and reading to help provide a strong foundation for their future educational endeavors. We also work to stimulate all areas of development, which includes creative interactions. This is showcased in our “Main Street” center at the heart of all of our educational centers. The Main Street allows for children to engage with each other to create social relationships, as well as foster creative thoughts. This offers children the opportunity to play, pretend, create, socialize and problem-solve. This sticks to our core values of allowing students to learn on through hands-on experiences, something that the “Main Street” can provide for your child.
Growing Kids Learning Centers believes in inspiring creativity for preschoolers, and have modeled our programs to foster a creative atmosphere for our students. Contact us today to learn more!

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Where the Wild Things Are

This classic book is a great start to enhancing your child’s reading skills and love for literature. The story touches on creative thinking and learning to understand and accept people for their differences. This is not only great for reading skills, but also emotional development. Your kid will love the story you cherished as a child!

The Color of Us

The Color of Us is an important book to teach your child about accepting people for who they are, regardless of what they look like, and embracing who you are despite the color of your skin.. This is an introduction into an important life lesson that your child will continually reshape and utilize throughout their lives.

The Giving Tree

A classic you may recall reading as a child, The Giving Tree is a great introduction into philosophical interpretations of stories. The tree constantly gives as the boy asks for more, but the tree remains happy as giving provides the tree immense joy.

Books are the gateway to critical thought and strengthening reading skills. Though the books listed are simply just the beginning of potential stories to have your child read, introducing them to literature can enhance lessons learned in school and open up a channel for creativity. Growing Kids Learning Center serves as Northern Indiana’s child care experts, helping children build successful futures. Our dedication to your child’s education is a fundamental aspect of our programs.

Check out our programs today to learn more about us

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Some of the many benefits of Preschool are:

Preschool helps nurture a nature for curiosity.

The preschool program at Growing Kids is designed to help each child to reach his or her full potential as a preschool student. We help create critical thought, through a variety of activities and introduction to literary and mathematical skills. Our “Main Street” section that is located at the heart of each Growing Kids center is an interactive child-sized mini-town that helps the kids develop creative and curious thought processes.

Preschool helps with the development of social and emotional skills

With your child being exposed to a school system, they get to learn real live social and emotional self-control skills that will are necessary to their ability to be successful students. The interaction with other children in an educational environment help your child manage their emotions, like frustration of not figuring out a problem or anger derived from that frustration. Our teachers at Growing Kids help ensure your children can thrive in a social environment, while managing and developing emotional skills. The “Main Street” interactive program helps in successfully developing those skills, as they engage in an opportunity to role-play, pretend, socialize and problem solve.

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Social Skills

If you’re not sure what the big deal behind developing social skills is, it’s time to switch that mentality. Children spend the first couple of years of their life with immediate family and family friends, so it’s easy to get comfortable, but there are plenty of other social skills that children need to develop in order to live a comfortable life in society. For instance, feeling confident enough to comfortably talk to new people, learning to share, understanding a schedule or waiting your turn. There are a lot of social norms that are taught at this young of an age, and having them mastered before going into kindergarten is something that can make the following years much easier on you and your child as a student.

Topical Lessons

Children at this age aren’t expected to be incredibly developed, but starting to build the foundation of children this age is something that will prove to be helpful and beneficial as they move on into other grade levels. We will begin to start practicing how to hold a book and turn pages, learn colors and numbers, and start to work on the alphabet. These types of lessons will be reviewed once your child is in kindergarten, but starting to have a grasp on these topics can make all of the difference when it comes to how easily they retain the information and understand what they’re doing.

If you are still curious about what our preschool center will provide your child with, feel free to schedule a tour of our establishment. We would be more than happy to walk you through the area and give you a better idea of what children of this age group should be covering.

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While these traits are not necessarily the case for all preschoolers, they are ones that we see in students who confidently walk into a preschool class. Again, these traits will not determine the success of your child, but they are visible in the children that enter at younger ages, and do well in preschool.

Is your child pretty independent?

One of the hardest parts of going to parents is having to accept that your parents aren’t there. If your child is someone that is pretty independent – is potty trained, can wash their hands, eats without assistance, etc. – then they are a great fit for daycare! While we do see some areas that most kids struggle with, for instance napping on their own, the more independent the child, the better. This allows for us to spend more time on learning!

Has your child ever spent time away from you?

Again, preschool is difficult because it is a good amount of time away from the parents. If your child has spent a majority of their life thus far with you, enrolling right into preschool may be difficult. Granted, there are plenty of children that get comfortable pretty quickly with preschool and their peers. However, if they’re on the younger side of the age range, we suggest enrolling them in daycare or even half day preschool, until they show signs that they’re comfortable being away from mom and dad.

Aside from these two basic traits, children that are outgoing or exceptionally social and involved are always a good fit for daycare. This allows them to utilize their energy in a productive manner, while also providing an opportunity on how to properly control these personality traits. For further information on whether or not your child is ready to be enrolled in preschool, you can set aside time to speak with one of our team members. We would be more than happy to provide you with a consultation here at Growing Kids Learning Center in Elkhart!

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When it comes to preschool, most of us can hardly remember what age we were when we were going. If you’re looking for help from your parents, they’re probably saying that they never went and turned out alright. And while it’s not unheard of for someone to have never gone to preschool, the education system has changed and the rate at which children develop has too, which is exactly why the age range for when children start going to preschool has evolved.

Age Two

The average age of children that are going to preschool across the nation is two. That may seem extremely young, but when you think about it, this is about the age where children start going to daycare. Rather than simply leaving them in the hands of a babysitter, you could be leaving your child in the care of a professional where they can learn skills that help them develop as an individual. From learning to talk to tasks like potty training, daycare centers are able to provide the time and care that little ones need in this stage.

Age Three

This is the age where people really start to consider preschool as an option for their child. At this point they are a little older and more developed and are able to stand alone socially. For the most part, children are at the end stage of their potty training, have gained an understanding of colors, animals and numbers, and can begin to actually retain some of the information that they’ve learned. This is also the age where we see parents most comfortable to leave their child with someone else.

Age Four

In the past, age four was the age that was most commonly known for preschool enrollment. For the most part, there are children that are four in preschool, but at this point in time they’re also a little older than the average age of preschoolers. In some cases, four years olds are already enrolled in kindergarten, so we suggest enrolling in preschool prior to age four.

If you have questions as to whether or not your child is a viable candidate for preschool, don’t hesitate to call Growing Kids Learning Center, we’re more than happy to help!

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The Most Recommended Ways To Get Your Kiddo Excited About Preschool

1. Enroll your child in extracurricular activities. One way to get your kiddo excited is to enroll them in an after school program. We have programs at The Growing Kids Learning Center here in Goshen, but we also recommend signing your child up for a sport! Kids love playing soccer, T-ball or gymnastics. If they’re not into sports, you can look into science adventure clubs in our community. There are plenty of activities your kiddo would love to do. This way, they will look forward to their sports or club after the school day is over!
2. Show why preschool is relevant to them now. They may be a little young, but it’s never too soon to start prepping your kiddo for the “real world.” Encourage your child that they need to learn many different things that they’ll use when they’re grown-up!
3. Always compliment and encourage your child. Your child won’t be excited for preschool if you’re not excited for them. Make sure you’re encouraging them day in and day out about preschool and what they’ll learn that day!

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