Imagine that you are invited to a good spread of feast. You are served mouth-watering starters, soup, a variety of items for the main course, side dishes, gravy, salads, sweet-puddings and a good choice of desserts. Hmm… I invite you to further imagine that you eat just enough and relish every mouthful… What a chortled satisfaction you would get! ( Sigh!)
How about giving a similar experience to your child? We are not discussing the Party’s Menu here, of course. Let’s feed in the vital, basic knowledge of as many topics as possible to the little one in five different packages — all gift-wrapped, for sure. The “five” magical routes are nothing else but the five functions of the sense organs of your little child: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching.
Your child is already taking one or more of these faculties – every moment that he is awake — to satiate his ever-growing appetite for knowledge - touching and grabbing the things within reach and putting them hastily into his tiny mouth, listening to the jingles on the TV and turning his head towards it. Let us travel along with him in all his ‘normal’ explorations - supplementing his journey with some wonderful inputs of information. YOU can plan the journey: The flash cards that we discuss elaborately are fully based on the ’seeing’ and ‘hearing’. The picture cards too, engage these two functions basically. It is up to us to engage the remaining three functions - ‘touching’, ‘tasting’ and ’smelling’. And make these fertile years of the little one the reservoir for his prosperous future.
The auspicious moments to make this journey are numerous. The time when
- you give a bath to your child
- you feed him his frequent meals
- you put him to sleep
- you take a drive for more than 5 minutes
- you console him after a spell of weeping.
or even any other moment that you think would suit best.
The bottom line is two fold: Trust and Love. And the result: immense joy on your part and the utter thrill on the child’s side.
The key is simple. let us explore the 5 sensational routes now:
‘SEEING’ & HEARING
You already have the basic training tools for these two functions: the Flash cards. Trace the very recent experiences of your child: The pleasant ones as well as the tear shells. The recent visit to a theme park could be and example (or even the usual visit to the park of your neighbourhood — as would suit your child). Make cards with these words: Round-about, Slide, Swing, See-Saw, Merry-go-round, etc… Choose the happy moments to flash these cards. Your child will be in raptures and virtually grab the hand written words from the sheet of paper and stamp them in his memory, blissfully!
With your child by your side, everything that you see is an experience in itself. You cease to be a mute spectator or a silent witness any more. You rather ‘watch, observe and assimilate’ the happening. To quote a few -
- The rain, rainbow, clouds of strange shapes, the sun emerging from behind the clouds…
- The bird that visits your balcony regularly.
- The whirlpool that you could make in the water-filled bucket before your child’s bath.
- The numerous stories of a tall building.
With the age of your child, the list varies, too. It is your very own choice.
Considering the function of HEARING exclusively, you have plenty of scope. It is up to you to train the ears of your young one. Starting very early, you could initiate him to listening to classical music of all kinds - vocal or instrumental. Every time that you play the music, you may call out the artist’s name and the note that is being played. With such regular practice, the child’s hearing is fine-tuned to the distinct decibels of a variety of musical presentations. Your child is already an expert in this field, you may be saying now: he judges the moments of the day and reacts accordingly purely going by the changes in the noises he hears and keeping the guessing a success every time.
TOUCHING
You cannot improve your child’s vocabulary in a better way rather than making him feel what it means. The adjectives and opposites (hot-cold, warm-chill, rough-smooth, hard-soft, damp-dry), adverbs (gently, gradually), concepts ( staking, arranging in a line), ideas (’castle’ on the beach, ‘car’ with his building blocks) - the avenues before you are endless. And the exclusive thing about this is that your child learns it all involuntarily and as pure fun.
TASTING
Aren’t you very particular about being the BOSS of this function? Of course, you are! Though the little one may be the most eager one to make explorations exclusively through this function, you will be caught chiding him for his indulgence! Let us make it positive: When it comes to food in particular, it is wiser to introduce the taste and not force it just because you feel that it would do him good. Well, chances are that he will certainly object, refuse and go on strike. Still, prefer to offer and not force it upon him or worse, cheat him with faked promises. For two reasons:
- He will not want to trust you anymore.
- You misuse one lovely route for imparting knowledge.
Instead, play a game to fill his tummy: On the first day choose the VEHICLES, for example. Take a spoonful of his meal and tell your child that it is an airplane driven by a pilot, flying right into the Hangar (the open mouth). The next spoonful is a pair of bulls on the plough driven by the farmer (you may show a picture of this) that rushes right into the fields (the wide open mouth, of course). And more vehicles to follow. The next day choose a set of wild animals (keep the domestic animals for the next meal!) Each spoonful ‘becomes’ the animal, leaping, jumping, running, trotting, even while roaring, neighing, trumpeting (You bring in the corresponding word and make a demo of it, without fail). The animals reach the jungle (your child’s open-mouth) and live there happily!
With an older child, you may speak about the journey of the food (Farm-storage/granary-transportation- retailing-your own shopping car-kitchen-stove-plate). The next session could be the journey of the food from the spoon to mouth to food pipe… up to excretion.
Happy feeding!
SMELLING
This is almost always the primary function as is the ‘touching’ - even in the case of a new-born. The fragrances of a variety of things that come in your child’s life every day are wonderful tools of teaching and help enhance his vocabulary:
- His soap.
- His soup.
- His other favorite food items
- His toiletry items - shampoo, talcum powder…
- The scent of different flowers, fruits..
Every time he experiences the smell, you may call out delightedly, or even a step further and write down the word on the flash card and flash them a couple of times as that would suffice his grasping power to put the word in store - just because he has experienced the word.
Simply put, all the five functions of the sense organs are, in most cases, intertwined and work as a team. It is absolutely necessary and mandatory, of course: The child is the King in his own territory of learning: we remain his humble and loving companions, nothing more.
Rest assured, you are sowing in your child two imperishable seeds: The love for learning, the habit of finding joy in everything that your child does.