Activity with words and pictures

	These activities require only a brief introduction from a teacher or parent and are suitable for independent group work within the hour of class with kids 6 years
	Which of these is a circle?
	How to draw a dog In this lesson, learn how to draw a cute dog. You will need: - Pencil - Pen - Eraser - Paper - Colored pencils or crayons Tips : Use lightly sketched pencil lines first for the structure. After, use a pen to draw in the final lines. When you're finished, erase the underlying pencil lines to reveal your drawing. Then - color it! Let's start! Follow step by step our easy indications below ! STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 Color it with the colors of your imagination.

Children and sports

Sports help children develop physical skills, get exercise, make friends, have fun, learn to play as a member   

of a team, learn to play fair, and improve self-esteem. American sports culture has increasingly become a money making business. The highly stressful, competitive, "win at all costs" attitude prevalent at colleges and with professional athletes affects the world of children's sports and athletics; creating an unhealthy environment. It is important to remember that the attitudes and behavior taught to children in sports carry over to adult life. Parents should take an active role in helping their child develop good sportsmanship. To help your child get the most out of sports, you need to be actively involved. This includes:

• providing emotional support and positive feedback,
• attending some games and talking about them afterward,
• having realistic expectations for your child,
• learning about the sport and supporting your child's involvement,
• helping your child talk with you about their experiences with the coach and other team members,
• helping your child handle disappointments and losing, and
• modeling respectful spectator behavior

                                                                                                      
Although this involvement takes time and creates challenges for work schedules, it allows you to become more knowledgeable about the coaching, team values, behaviors, and attitudes. Your child's behavior and attitude reflects a combination of the coaching and your discussions about good sportsmanship and fair play.
It is also important to talk about what your child observes in sports events. When bad sportsmanship occurs, discuss other ways the situation could be handled. While you might acknowledge that in the heat of competition it may be difficult to maintain control and respect for others, it is important to stress that disrespectful behavior is not acceptable. Remember, success is not the same thing as winning and failure is not the same thing as losing.
If you are concerned about the behavior or attitude of your child's coach, you may want to talk with the coach privately. As adults, you can talk together about what is most important for the child to learn. While you may not change a particular attitude or behavior of a coach, you can make it clear how you would like your child to be approached. If you find that the coach is not responsive,  discuss the problem with the parents responsible for the school or league activities. If the problem continues, you may decide to withdraw your child.

As with most aspects of parenting, being actively involved and talking with your children about their life is very important. Being proud of accomplishments, sharing in wins and defeats, and talking to them about what has happened helps them develop skills and capacities for success in life. The lessons learned during

children's sports will shape values and behaviors for adult life.                   

                                                                                                                                

Toys for kids preeschool

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Kindergarten Toys

Your child develops many important skills during the first years of schooling, both at school as well as home. Kindergarten toys aid in early education of the child. These

are designed in such a way as to keep the child engrossed, and help in the development of the child’s social skills, gross motor skills and also communication skills. The toys also help in developing the child’s concentration; the more engaging the toy, the better concentration the child will develop. Many of these toys also require two or three children playing together. This serves as a nice way for the children to bond and learn the basic skills of team play.
Kindergarten age kids broadly fall into three categories. The youngest are the four year olds who are yet  to develop all the gross motor skills and are a little unsteady in many of the movements. The four year olds form the second category. Four year olds usually attain stability in all their movements and also gain confidence of their motor skills. The oldest are the five year olds. By this age, the kid’s movements are very coordinated and have acquired almost all the motor skills. The classification of the kindergarten children is important as the children of the three categories have  different preferences when it comes to toys, as with many other things.
The preference of toys among the kindergarten kids also varies from boys to girls. Girls are usually partial to dolls and dollhouses whereas boys are more fascinated by magnet games, Lego, etc. Children also like simple musical instruments like a small electronic piano. Following are the kindergarten toys that girls and boys like:
Girls like these toys:
·    Dolls
·    Costumes
·    Sorting toys
·    Beads
·    Craft
·    Simple constructions
On the other hand, boys prefer these:
·    Magnet games
·    Lego
·    Wooden blocks
·    Simple wooden toys
·    Ball games

There are also kindergarten toys that children of all ages, both boys and girls, enjoy equally. These are puzzles, card games, board games, small cycles, etc. When the child’s circle of friends consists of both boys and girls, these toys are the ones that all the friends will enjoy equally.
When buying kindergarten toys, certain precautions must be taken. It is always a good idea to check if the manufacturer has indicated age group for which the toy is suitable. Toys without such indication should be avoided at all costs.
Painting is an activity that kindergarten age kids enjoy a lot. There are many toys where the child is supposed to do paintings with specific colors at specific places. These toys help children discern between colors and is a fun way of learning color names. Don’t let the children use small chalk or crayons though, as they can cause chocking if swallowed. One important thing you should remember is to always supervise kids playing with kindergarten toys.
You can use our product page to find our recommended kindergarten toys. We have selected these toys because they offer kids a great learning experience. When a child has fun, it is easy for them to learn. Playing with these toys goes a long way to the development of your child.

School objects

Classroom Objects

Creative Activities with Children

Create a Story Book with Your Child

 A fun way to build your child's imagination Writing is still one of our major forms of communication as well as a great way to express ourselves. Creating a storybook with your child is a fun way to introduce him or her to creative writing. You will also get to spend a few hours of quality time together and the end result will become a family treasure for years to come. All you need is a notebook, a pen, and anything else you and your child would like to use to illustrate a story. You can draw pictures together, or make a collage out of old photos and magazine cut outs. Of course you can also add stickers, glitter or anything else you can come up with. But let's start at the beginning. The idea is to come up with a story and to write it down in the notebook. If your child has never made up a story, she will need some guidance and help from you. Think about what she is interested in right now: dinosaurs, ponies, ballet; characters from a particular book or TV show, etc. Ask your child to name the main characters and encourage them to describe what they look like, what clothes they are wearing and where they are. You'll be surprised how quickly they will come up with a story line from there. Encourage them along the way. If your child is old enough to write, have her write the story herself as you go along creating it. Offer to take turns if she is still new at writing. Otherwise, write it down for her. Have fun decorating or illustrating the story. Start your next creative writing afternoon by reading some of the stories you have already created. Give your child the option to either continue with the same set of characters or to come up with some new ones. Before long you will have an entire book of stories that you will both treasure for a long time. ----------------------------------------------------------

Click on each box to enter letters in the crossword puzzle, then press the Check Answers button. If you are stuck, press the Hint button to get a letter.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Across 1. Use it to add numbers 3. Write with this 5. You can write with this, too. 8. You read this. 9. White and blank Down 1. A useful tool for almost anything 2. You measure with this. 4. It writes on the blackboard. 6. A view of the world. 7. Where you sit to write.

Toys for kids preschool.

PRESCHOOLERS

At preschool age, children tend to be bundles of energy with lots to say and lots more to discover. Some preschoolers chatter constantly, some run and play incessantly and some sing, dance and perform, basking in the glow of attention. And even if your preschooler is just as happy flipping quietly through books, he's got creative energy just waiting to be unleashed. Consider preschooler-oriented educational toys like puppets, hide-away tents, costume articles for dress-up, easels and art supplies, as well as books that invite imagery or rhythmic speaking.

TOYS FOR PRESCHOOLERS
PLAY FOR PRESCHOOLERSMUSICAL FUN FOR PRESCHOOLERS
STORIES AND POEMS FOR PRESCHOOLERS

TOYS FOR PRESCHOOLERS

This is a dramatic and creative age. Many conversations between preschool-age friends start with "Let's pretend...." Children become social. They become interested in playing with each other instead of preferring to play alone. Many toys become props for cooperative play.

Preschool-age children also are interested in active physical play. They have more control of their muscles at this age and this can be seen in the move from a tricycle to a two-wheel bike. Preschoolers also are increasingly curious about the world around them. They enjoy realistic toys such as farm and animal sets, grocery store prop boxes, model cars, and trains.

As hand coordination increases, so does the child's interest in simple construction sets and more difficult puzzles. They can manage more difficult creative projects, and enjoy cutting and simple sewing projects, in addition to the paint and play dough of earlier stages. Since children at this age also are busy learning to read and write, give them play equipment that encourages these interests.

You may notice that preschool children play with many of the same toys as toddlers, but do so in different ways. As a caregiver, encourage them to be creative and to experiment. There are fewer safety concerns in this stage, but sharp or cutting toys and electrical toys are still too dangerous.

Appropriate Toys for Preschoolers

puppets
farm and community play sets
transportation vehicles of all types
simple construction toys
creative materials
books and records
wheel toys
sleds
simple musical instruments
boxes
climbing structures
prop boxes
water play toys
puzzles
balls
cognitive games
dress-up clothes
housekeeping props
dolls and stuffed animals
character toys

How you can help

1. Get a book on puppets from your local library. Then act out a scene.

2. Act out fairy tales or other children's stories. *The Three Bears*, *The Three Billy Goats Gruff*, and *Caps for Sale* are good starting stories for this. For more ideas on things to do with children and books, see *Good Times with Stories and Poems*.

3. Reverse roles with the child. Let him or her pretend to be the caregiver and you pretend to be the child.

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PLAY FOR PRESCHOOLERS

Children who are 4 and 5 are ready for more organized social play. They grow away from being interested only in their own ideas to being interested in the actions and feelings of others.

Preschoolers love to dress-up and pretend. They need dress-up clothes - hats, high heels, purses, play money, or anything grown-ups wear. Providing costumes, dress-up clothes, and equipment or furnishings encourages preschoolers toward creative, dramatic play. Big boxes that can become houses or stores are wonderful. These activities give them a chance to act out their feelings, emotions, and how they view the world about them. This practice of grown-up roles leads to the child's understanding of adults by giving the child a chance to play at being an adult. Preschoolers learn how it feels to be big. They pretend, imagine, create, and imitate what they think it is like to be grown up. They practice relating to their friends. Creative play combines the elements of imagination and fantasy with what is real.

The preschooler learns rapidly through play. Learning the differences in how things feel, look, and sound helps children develop intellectual skills. The child's vocabulary expands through learning about color and size in play activities. As children develop physically through running, jumping, and hopping, they learn action words.

Giving a child an opportunity to get messy also is a learning experience. Playing in mud, sand, and water or painting and coloring gives children a sense of freedom and another chance to strengthen their imagination and creativity. Preschoolers are not lying when they tell wonderful and exciting tales about things that adults know are not true. They are being creative.

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MUSICAL FUN FOR PRESCHOOLERS

Children who are 4 and 5 enjoy singing just to be singing! They like songs that repeat words and melodies, rhythms with a definite beat and words that ask them to do things. Preschool children enjoy nursery rhymes and songs about familiar things like toys, animals, play activities, and people. They also like fingerplays and nonsense rhymes with or without musical accompaniment.

If you are caring for preschool children, provide a wide variety of music for them to listen to; folk songs, symphonies, operas, rock and roll, and even sound tracks from movies they might have seen. Suggest that everyone pretend to be animals or objects like cats, elephants, trucks, or bouncing balls, and then imitate these in response to the music. You might provide the children with long scarves with which they can pretend to make butterfly wings. Together, you can move your bodies and "wings" and "fly" along with the music!

More about Children and Music and Rhythm.

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STORIES AND POEMS FOR PRESCHOOLERS

Four- and 5-year-olds enjoy stories about things they know. They also like to hear things repeated and enjoy rhythm and rhyme. By now their attention span is more developed and they are able to listen to longer books. You can choose a book with short chapters and read one or two at a time. You might even read a new chapter each time you care for the children.

Preschoolers often memorize words to a favorite book and can "read" the story out loud. They use the pictures as clues to help them remember the words. This is their first step in learning to read. Give them lots of encouragement.

Four-year-olds have a great sense of humor and are curious about people and the world around them. They like to talk and tell "tall tales." They also love silly language, riddles, and non-sense rhymes. Sometimes they will even make up their own nonsense rhymes and exaggerated stories to test their language skills. (They are not "lying", just testing their knowledge of real and pretend.)

Five-year-olds are interested in their families, schools, and neighborhoods, and ask many questions beginning with "how" and "why." Choose books about how things are made or done and why things happen. You may want to think of 5-year-olds as little scientists, always asking questions and testing things out.

Four- and 5-year-olds are forming real friendships for the first time, so stories about friends are meaningful to them. Preschoolers also are beginning to have a sense of rules and justice. They are interested in stories about fairness. They also like stories in which the characters make choices and decisions and get involved in confusing situations. Preschoolers also can learn from stories and poems that portray changes in time since their sense of time is not yet developed.

As a caregiver, it is important for you to remember that 4-and 5-year-olds want to be independent, but still are in need of warmth and security. Books about happy family relationships make them feel good. There are many quality books in libraries and stories today about single parent families, stepfamilies, working mothers, and even grandparents. Be sensitive to the kind of families that the children you care for are growing up in!

Books for Preschoolers

Preschoolers enjoy information books and story books, both realistic and fantasy. Non-fiction books about dinosaurs, insects,rocks, foreign countries, and other subjects that interest them are favorites. They also like realistic stories about their worlds of home and community. Try reading stories about real-life children and places.

The silly language and nonsense of Dr. Seuss books also are perfect for this age. Other favorite topics are first experiences (like a first visit to the dentist), family relationships, funny and wild stories, books about weather and seasons, feelings, nature, and animals.

How you can help

You can help by listening to 4-year-olds' "tall tales" without being critical, and by reading fantasy stories such as *Where the Wild Things Are* to satisfy their yen for the outlandish. You also can help by making an effort to answer 5-year-olds' questions. If you do not know the answer, you may say, "I do not know the answer to that, but let's find a book about it." With the parents' permission, you might plan a trip to the library to find the answer.

To help preschoolers become better thinkers and problem solvers, you can choose stories in which the main character makes a decision. You also can encourage children to talk about or retell stories in their own words and tell you about decisions they have made. Remember how dramatic they can be!

Play silly word games with 4- and 5-year-olds to help develop their language skills. See who can make up the silliest nonsense rhymes. Tell some stories with big words.

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Reprinted with permission from the National Network for Child Care - NNCC. Lagoni, L. S., Martin, D. H., Maslin-Cole, C., Cook, A., MacIsaac, K., Parrill, G., Bigner, J., Coker, E., & Sheie, S. (1989). Good times being creative. In *Good times with child care* (pp. 239-253). Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University Cooperative Extension.

The alphabet for kids.

Alphabet Set 1 - Aa - apple - Bb - bag - Cc - cat - Dd - duck - Ee - egg - Ff - fish - Gg - grapes	Alphabet Set 2 - Hh - house - Ii - igloo - Jj - jump - Kk - kite - Ll - lemon - Mm - monkey - Nn - net
Alphabet Set 3 - Oo - orange - Pp - pig - Qq - quiet - Rr - rabbit - Ss - sun - Tt - turtle - Uu - umbrella - Vv - violin	Alphabet Set 4 - Ww - window - Xx - fox - Yy - yo-yo - Zz - zebra . . .

" Language acquisition

Learning Objectives

Acquire a broad outline of how children develop language skills. Explore some of the psychological and linguistic theories surrounding the acquisition of language. Examine some ways in which language continues to develop through the teenage years into adulthood. Look at suggestions as to why language itself evolves over time. Session 1 Naming Names ET, the well-known Extra-Terrestrial, learnt human language fast: 'His ear-flap opened and he listened intently ... His ... circuits buzzed, assimilating, synthesizing ... Thus inspired, the language centre of his marvellous brain came fully on ...' Yet ET's magical ability is almost matched by that of human children. As the American statesman Benjamin Franklin once said: 'Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.' Jean Aitchison Figure 1. Typical speech timetable for an English-speaking child. Children talk so readily because they instinctively know in advance what languages are like. As in a spider's web, the outline is preprogrammed, and the network is built up in a preordained sequence. The predictable way in which the language web develops is the topic of this seminar, including how adults can help, or sometimes even slow down a child's progress. Language has a biologically organized schedule (see Figure 1). Children everywhere follow a similar pattern. In their first few weeks, babies mostly cry. As Ronald Knox once said: 'A loud noise at one end, and no sense of responsibility at the other.' Crying exercises the lungs and vocal cords. But crying may once have had a further evolutionary purpose. Yelling babies may have reminded parents that their offspring exist: deaf ringdoves forget about their existing brood, and go off and start another. From six weeks onwards, infants coo or even mew according to some older accounts, which sometimes compared these early gurgles to the twittering of birds. From around six months, babies babble language-like sounds. 'He called me mummy' is a typical squawk of a delighted new parent, as a child exercises its mouth with the sequence ma-ma-ma or da-da-da. Over-interpretation by parents is why the words mama, papa and dada are found all over the world for 'mother' and 'father', closely followed by kaka for 'excrement'. A widespread myth circulates, that infants burble all sounds of every language. This is untrue, the range is in fact rather limited. The myth arose partly because some early researchers found it hard to distinguish early infant gurgles, and partly because children do indeed produce some sounds not found in the language they are learning. But a babbling drift takes place, in which children gradually veer towards the sounds found in their own language: Chinese babies are reported to babble single syllables with different tones. Single words 'Oo! Da!' are produced from around the age of a year. Parents often play naming games with youngsters: they point to a black fluffy blob in a book and say 'cat'. Little Bobby or Suzy imitates, saying maybe ga. The discovery that ga is a name for the dark splodge comes later. Children do not at first realize that sounds can be labels for things. Early words are tied strongly to a location, and often relate to a whole scene. A word da for a toy duck might be for one particular duck as it floats in a particular bath. Only later will da be used for a duck away from the bath, and later still extended to all ducks, and maybe swans, geese--and even toy boats. The naming insight, the discovery that things have names, is a major leap forward. Children pass this milestone at various times, typically before the age of eighteen months. Parents don't usually notice it, it seems so normal, because adults expect things to have names. But for youngsters, the naming discovery can be a shock, as shown by occasional children who come to it late. Helen Keller was deaf and blind from the age of two. Then, when she was six, her teacher held her hand under a flow of water, and spelled out the word w-a-t-e-r on the other. She later wrote: 'Somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul.. ., set it free! . . . Everything had a name, . . . every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.' Session 2 Innate Abilities The naming insight is followed by a 'naming explosion'. Names come popping out of children like stars out of fireworks. This eruption in vocabulary leads to word combinations, mummy push, daddy car and so on. Some phrases are novel, as byebye sock, allgone kitty, which are unlikely to have been copied from adults. Recurring patterns are found as with sand toe, 'I've got sand in my toes', sand eye 'I've got sand in my eye', and sand hair 'I've got sand in my hair'. The parents were probably too busy mopping the sand off this child to admire the consistency of its language rules. Jean Aitchison Figure 2. Innately guided behaviour. Youngsters look for regularities in language, as shown by the wug-test, devised by Jean Berko Gleason in the 1950s. 'Here is a wug', she said, showing a picture of a bird-like creature. Then she showed two of them: 'Now there are two...' 'Wugs' responded children from a very young age. Children do not always get it right first time. Two-year-old Sophie learned the words broken, fallen and taken. She wrongly concluded that English past tenses end in -en. She then invented a whole range of new past tense forms, such as boughten, builden, riden, gotten, cutten, wanten, touchen, maden, tippen, as in 'me tippen that over'. Sophie gradually dropped these -en forms--probably when she discovered the normal past tense for each verb. Children dislike finding two words which mean exactly the same thing, and usually drop one of them. By the age of three, children utter long sentences, though some things, such as pronouns, still cause problems. Three-year-old Adam said his doll 'shuts she's eyes', instead of 'shuts her eyes'. At around three and a half, children talk freely. By this time, they have acquired most of the constructions used by adults. This is true of monolingual children, and also bilingual ones. A few gaps still exist for all children up to the age of around ten, and word-learning goes on throughout life. This predictable sequence of events is typical of biologically scheduled behaviour, as pointed out by Eric Lenneberg, a pioneer in this field. His book Biological foundations of language, published in 1967, was a major landmark. Before then, natural behaviour, such as seals swimming, was usually separated from nurtured or learned behaviour, as when seals can be taught to jump through hoops. Lenneberg showed that this divide is over simple. Most natural behaviour requires some learning: pigeons naturally fly, but they have to spend time learning how to stay in the air. Conversely, learning would be impossible if it did not build on natural talents: pigeons can be trained to distinguish between letters of the alphabet, but only because they already have acute eyesight. Language is an example of maturationally controlled behaviour, Lenneberg pointed out, behaviour which is preprogrammed to emerge at a particular stage in an individual's life, provided the surrounding environment is normal. Walking and sexual behaviour are other examples. Such behaviour emerges before it is critically needed, yet cannot be forced to appear before it is scheduled. Some learning is required, but the learning cannot be significantly speeded up by coaching. No external event or conscious decision causes it, and a regular sequence of milestones can be charted. An ability to cope with language structure is largely separate from general intelligence. In recent years, several so-called 'cocktail party chatterers' have been discovered--children who have a non-verbal IQ so low that they may not even know their own age, but who speak fluently. As at cocktail parties, they talk for the sake of talking, and their speech may not make sense. Take Laura, an American teenager: 'I was sixteen last year, and now I'm nineteen this year' or 'It was no regular school, it was just good old no buses.' Such chatterbox children are not just repeating set phrases, because they make grammatical mistakes which they are unlikely to have heard, as in Laura's statement that 'Three tickets were gave out by a police last year.' Just as bees learn fast to distinguish flowers from, say, balloons or bus-stops, so human children are preset by nature to pick out natural language sounds: they do not get distracted by barking dogs or quacking ducks. Their learning is innately guided (see Figure 2). Inbuilt signposts direct youngsters, so they instinctively pay attention to certain linguistic features, such as stressed vowels and word order. Children's main task is to discover which of these features have priority in the language or languages they are acquiring, just as bees have to learn whether to look for heather, roses or lilies. Session 3 Session 2 Leaps of Language A biological time-clock ordains the sequence in which the language web is woven, though not the exact dates. But nobody is quite sure when the clock starts ticking, and when it stops. According to Lenneberg, humans are scheduled to acquire language within a critical period between the ages of two and thirteen, a time preordained by human nature. After that, the acquisition of language was difficult, he claimed, maybe impossible. Lenneberg turns out to be partially wrong and partially right. He is wrong about the starting-point. Language acquisition begins well before the age of two. Babies only a few days old can pick out their own language, according to some research by Jacques Mehler and his colleagues in Paris. The infants responded to French with increased sucking movements, a standard reaction to sounds which interested them. But they did not display the same reaction to other languages. So infants still in the womb may become accustomed to the rhythms of the language spoken around them. And language development does not come to a shuddering halt at adolescence, as Lenneberg assumed: vocabulary even undergoes a spurt at this time. So the idea of a fixed critical period is now disputed. Yet most people find it easier to learn languages when they are young--so a sensitive period may exist, a time early in life when acquiring language is easiest, and which tails off gradually, though never entirely. A 'natural sieve' hypothesis is one idea put forward to explain this. Very young children may extract only certain limited features from what they hear, and may automatically filter out many complexities. Later learners may have lost this inbuilt filter, and be less able to cope as everything pounds in on them simultaneously. A 'tuning-in' hypothesis is another possibility. At each age, a child is naturally attuned to some particular aspect of language. Infants may be tuned in to the sounds, older children to the syntax, and from around ten onwards, the vocabulary becomes a major concern. Selective attention of this type fits in well with what we know about biologically programmed behaviour. Jean Aitchison Figure 3. Chomsky's switch-setting. The outlines of the language web are therefore preordained. Acquiring language involves weaving in the network details of one's own native tongue, with particular portions scheduled to be filled in at particular ages. Japanese, Welsh or Samoan--children handle all languages with equal efficiency. The American linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested that children might be innately endowed with advance information on the main ways in which languages can vary. So children may have to discover whether they are dealing with an English-type language, which puts verbs in front of its objects, or a Turkish-type one which does the reverse. Once a decision is made, the child metaphorically 'sets a switch', with multiple repercussions. If, as in English, a language has verbs before its objects, as in climb the tree, then it will also probably have prepositions before nouns as in up the tree. A language such as Hindi or Turkish would have the reverse, and say, as it were, the tree climb, and the tree up. It is as if the child was sitting in a linguistic bath, and watching which way water swirled down the plughole, clockwise or anti-clockwise. Once the youngster had found this out, then it would automatically know the linguistic equivalent of whether it was in the northern or southern hemisphere, and whether days got warmer to the north or to the south. In technical terminology, children 'set parameters', a mathematical term for a fixed property whose values vary (see figure 3). Chomsky makes acquiring language sound like turning on a light, more instantaneous than it really is. But his theory rightly emphasizes that any language holds together in a network of implications. If a language has one type of construction, others are predictable from it. But natural web-spinning can be both helped and sometimes hindered by the speech of those around. Early research talked of motherese, mother's speech. This left out fathers and friends, so caretaker speech became the fashionable term, later amended to caregiver speech, and in academic publications, to CDS 'child directed speech'. I'll leave it at caregivers. Another term 'baby-talk' is best avoided, because it usually refers to gee-gee, puff-puff, moo-cow-type words, so puzzlingly widespread in England when talking to babies or sending Valentines. Caregiver speech can be odd. Some parents are more concerned with truth than with language. The ill-formed 'Daddy hat on' might meet with approval, 'Yes, that's right', if daddy was wearing a hat. But the well-formed 'Daddy's got a hat on' might meet with disapproval, 'No, that's wrong', if daddy wasn't wearing a hat. You might expect children to grow up telling the truth, but speaking ungrammatically, as some early researchers pointed out. In fact, the opposite happens. Parents also reportedly care about etiquette: 'Say please', or they pick on swear words: 'Don't let me hear you say that word again', or they notice occasional pronunciation problems: 'Say Trisha, not Twisha.' If they do pick on language formation, it's often verb endings: this may be useful, if the child is tuned in at that time to learning these. If not, the correction is likely to be ignored. One much-quoted conversation was about baby rabbits: 'My teacher holded the baby rabbits, and we patted them', said the child. 'Would you say she held them tightly?' asked mother. 'Oh no, she holded them loosely', replied her daughter. At best, a sensitive parent provides support, by being aware of structures to which the child is attuned. Mostly, parents muddle along, sometimes getting it right, sometimes wrong. At worst, a grumbling tone of voice can sap confidence: a child may realize that something is wrong, but not always know what. Only talk directly addressed to the youngster has an effect. Vincent, a hearing child born to deaf parents, learned to communicate with sign language. He himself could hear, and he used to sit in front of the television, and watch the pictures with fascination. But apparently, he did not pay any attention to the sounds. He did not start to speak until he went to school, where people talked to him. And a recent survey in Manchester found that television can delay speech development even in some normal children: they are riveted by the colours and flashing lights, and tune out the sounds. Session 4 Session 3 Ongoing Development But even with face-to-face contact, the young learner sets the agenda. Clear, varied utterances directly addressed to the youngster are the silken strands out of which the child builds the language web. Caregiver speech is extra-useful when the same words come in more than once in different ways. Many parents do this naturally: 'Now Patsy, where did you get that knife? Give the knife to mummy. Give mummy the knife. There's a good girl.' Thinking Points Does language serve a different purpose in childhood than it does in adult life, or is children's language simply a stage in development towards maturity? Is language always about communication between individuals, or is it possible that a child could develop a language unknown to anybody except him- or herself? The talk has to grab the child's attention. Joint enterprises are all important. Research published around ten years ago showed that parents found it easier to talk to girls, mainly because they involved them more often in domestic chores: 'Come and help mummy with the potatoes', mothers tended to say to their daughters. But 'Go outside and play football', they commanded their sons. Not surprisingly, some families ended up with chattering potato-peeling girls, and tongue-tied football-kicking boys. This was one reason why girls were often a step ahead of boys in their language, it was suggested. Hopefully, this imbalance is being corrected, with both sexes now equally involved in chores, and perhaps equally acquiring language. But if people talk to them, all children respond well. They enjoy pit-patting the conversational ball backwards and forwards. 'Put on your coat', said father. 'Why?' asked junior. 'Because we're going out.' 'Why?' 'Because we're going to buy some dinner.' 'Why?' 'Because we have to eat.' 'Why?' At this point, father realized junior was not interested in the answers, but was treating the conversation as a game, which he wanted his father to go on playing. So children build the language web by extracting what they need from the talk they hear around them. Most are efficient chatterers long before they go to school. But they still need to learn which type of speech to use when--so-called 'communicative competence'. In linguistic terminology, different registers suit different occasions. Babies and bank managers must be addressed in different ways, just as different clothes are required for the beach and a wedding. A doctor speaking to another doctor might talk about a circumorbital haematoma, but to a schoolboy, it would be a black eye. The language web, then, has been mostly acquired by children by around the age of thirteen, apart from the mixing and matching of language styles, and also vocabulary. You might expect parents to cheer as their offspring become competent language users, and give them, say, a reward of a telephone on their thirteenth birthday. But the acquisition story is not yet over. At this age, language suddenly becomes a mudslinging match between generations. Teenagers want to talk like their pals, but parents disapprove. A father was shocked when his daughter informed him that she did not dare talk in her 'posh' home voice at school; she would lose her friends. Teenage stroppiness is partly to blame, with predictable kicks at convention--though this is normally a temporary phase. Teenagers' language usually gets less extreme as they approach adult life. But changing speech styles also tangle people up. These days, formal speech, like a top hat, is used on fewer occasions. Informal speech, like an open-necked shirt, is felt to be friendlier. In this easy-going atmosphere, being 'proper' is often regarded as less important than being 'matey'. Matiness and casualness are sometimes emphasized by swearing. Swearwords swarm like bees in some recent literature, and buzz about freely in conversation. Yet today's swearwords are undergoing a bleaching process, a fading of meaning that happens in all semantic change. In the last century, oaths using the name of God were widely disapproved of. Then they gradually lost their power to shock. These days, f-words (sexual swearing) and s-words (excrement-swearing) no longer horrify so many people. Their meaning has weakened as the original connection with sex and excrement fades. But the war of words between the generations is also entwined with the usual cobweb of worries which surround language change. Parents want their offspring to use so-called Standard English. What exactly they mean by this is a question which has long ensnared people in its sticky and dusty threads. The word 'standard' is ambiguous: it can mean either a value which has to be met, as in 'a high standard', or it can mean uniform practice, as in 'standard behaviour'. These two meanings of standard have long been confused. For example, in 1836, a treatise which offered 'principles of Remedy for Defects of Utterance', commented that 'the common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place of birth and residence are lost and nothing appears to indicate any other habits of intercourse than with the well-bred and well-informed, wherever they may be found'. So Standard English came to be thought of as the speech of the educated. This was often assumed to be the language of Oxford, so-called Oxford English, and of the most expensive fee-paying schools (known in England as 'public schools'). So the word 'standard' moved from meaning general usage to that of a specific group to be emulated. But it's important to distinguish between accent, which describes pronunciation, and dialect, which involves grammar. Spoken Standard English is not an accent--as pointed out in a recent survey commissioned by the National Curriculum Council (a body which sets up school curricula in Great Britain). Pronunciation has always varied, and Standard English includes a variety of accents. Different accents are a sign of identity, a badge of one's area. They are a problem only if they are hard to understand. Meanwhile, the grammar of English is fairly similar across the British Isles. Standard spoken English is usually defined as the grammatical forms used in formal public contexts, and they do not vary very much. But language is always changing, and a few fluctuating forms cause a disproportionate amount of anxiety. The phrase for you and I, in place of the presumed 'correct' form, for you and me, came out top of the complaints in letters written to the BBC about language. Yet several well-known figures have used it in public quite recently, including Oxford-educated Lady Thatcher, who commented that 'It's not for you and I to condemn the state of the Malawi economy.' A surprising mismatch exists between what people condemn and the condemned forms they use without noticing. Perhaps the next generation will shake itself free of this cobweb of pseudo-worries. The language web, like a spider's web, is woven in a preordained way. As with spiders, time and effort have to go into the weaving process. But humans, unlike spiders, can think about the webs they have woven. This sometimes gives rise to a superfluous cobweb of worries. Ideally, the final layers of a child's web-building would be supplemented by two extra, conscious strands: tolerance of minor variations and an interest in each other's speech. In Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, first performed in 1916, the character Henry Higgins refers to the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle as a 'squashed cabbage leaf, complaining that 'a woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere, no right to live'. This narrow-minded view is luckily disappearing. Increasingly, people are beginning to realize that variety is the spice of linguistic life.