Our 21st-century learners need to be creative, because we can witness today our world is gravitating towards creativity and one no more needs to be an Engineer or a Doctor to earn money. Creative professions are evolving, and many aspirants are treading this unconventional route by making vocation their full-time career opportunity. But that doesn’t mean that creativity can’t be applied to mainstream job opportunities.
Creativity helps us solve problems more easily and be innovative. Creative people don’t have to strive so hard to generate novel ideas! When creative ideas are implemented, it leads to new product development or improves the way people work, maximizing efficiency.
Across all industries, ingenuity is highly appreciated, and companies prefer to hire talented individuals who have proved their worth by accomplishing something with their creative skills.
Here are some facts that will help strengthen your resolve towards opting to develop your creative skills even further;
Does coding have to do anything with creativity? Can a preschooler find his ‘eye for creativity’ by learning to code? According to stats, it is proved that 58% of students in grades 6-8 were able to develop their creative skills, just by taking-up coding classes. With the STEAM curriculum being fully integrated into schools across the globe including Dubai, coding has become like just another subject.
Coding a robot sounds fun, doesn’t it? Coding also helps build cool things such as gaming apps, virtual simulators, interactive websites, and other cool stuff that we use extensively today.
Our friend ‘Alexa’ was invented with coding capabilities and creative intelligence; to help us stream music & manage our daily schedules more effectively. Like a family member, she never falters to remind us of ‘play dates’ or ‘important meetings.
The above points prove that coding needs some level of creativity, and by practicing to code we can further explore our creative talents & use it in other areas of our lives.
When children enter preschool, they are naturally curious and find ways to discover the world around them. Introducing coding at this phase of their lives proves beneficial as kids then grow-up liking the subject even more and simultaneously discovering their creative skills. Matatalab provides a holistic screenless coding platform for children of ages 4 and up to foster talent. Their hands-on coding sets available in UAE are amusing and keep children engaged for a long time. The MatataBot can do different things; including making art! Yes, children can use arrow keys to navigate the Bot and make some wonderful art on paper.
So, use your imagination and command the MatataBot to create scenes, design shapes, and bring your imagination to life.
Gone are those days when budding artists needed to draw & sketch themselves! It is now possible to make art via a Robot. The Matatalab Sets are available for sale in GCC & across the Middle East by simply reaching out to us.
Some schools even host Art Competitions by allowing kids to use MataBots and challenge them to conquer different levels, by expecting more sophisticated & complex artworks. Afterall, the right coding Robot opens up a world of creativity for your child.
Reading, writing, and communicating effortlessly are life-nurturing skills. Your child will develop these skills if they get into the habit of reading in their growing years. It has countless advantages, mainly that uplifts their grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling, thereby making them super confident. This entire learning process of reading and mastering spelling goes hand in hand. When children get a grip on spellings, they will be motivated to read even more fluently and hence we say this is correlated. We have mentioned a few activities below that will help your children memorize spellings the fun way.
This is a simple yet the most constructive exercise. Every time there is a new word, big or small, make sure you break it down for your child and while the word is broken into syllables, do sound them out, thus making it easier for them to remember the spelling and then they will be able to pronounce the entire word correctly in one go.
Visual representations always work well with children. Where in certain cases it may be difficult to memorize text straight away but they will definitely remember the picture associated with the word. So, whenever your child gets confused with certain spellings, make sure you explain with some reference image.
Melodies have lasting memories. Teach your children spellings through music. It may be rhymes or poems or action songs. Rhythms are effective, even if they forget the spelling, they will recall the letters and the word as per the tune
You may have time and again come across words that your children frequently struggle with. Once they have been identified, you must highlight such words and make your child write them down and make them understand the meaning of it. You can associate an example to remember with that word and then memorizing its spelling will become easier and the next time they read any text and come upon that word they will not stumble anymore.
Jumbled-up words are great to teach spelling to children. Kids derive immense joy in solving the scrambled word and declaring the right spelling. Imagine jumbling up DUBAI to BAIDU, this way they will memorize spellings and learn words creatively. You can start with small words and proceed to bigger words and use common or proper nouns.
Children and adults alike love solving word search puzzles. The letters grid is given and usually, there are about 10 to 15 words present in that grid to be found. The only difference is that the words are not scrambled like in the previous activity. The alphabets of the words are present in the correct order but words are either placed vertically, horizontally, or diagonally in the grid. The list of the words to be searched in the grid is given and every puzzle is based on a genre. So, in this way children are introduced to numerous words and are memorizing their spellings with a lot of thrill.
This is an all-time favorite family game not just in the Middle East but loved across generations around the world. Play scrabble with children while they are young. This board game is so exciting, that they would want to play a game anytime. The dictionary often comes to the rescue in this game when the players debate the spelling of certain words or even when they funnily argue whether a particular word exists in the dictionary or not. Calculation of the word formed to attain points is the high point of this game. Your child is learning fabulous words, knowing their spellings, and polishing Math too. It’s one game with tremendous benefits.
This is another fun task to undertake with your children. There are plenty of abbreviations to learn. Basically, your kids are learning the short form of a word or a phrase and simultaneously memorizing its spellings.
E.g. For Country – United Arab Emirates is abbreviated to UAE.
E.g. For Organisation – Gulf Co-operation Council is abbreviated to GCC
Reading Eggs makes the learning-to-read journey fun, interactive, and highly rewarding for ages 2-13, based on solid scientific research. They provide an educationally sound and highly enjoyable program that is effective and easy to integrate into your daily routine. Fast Phonics is an online synthetic program that helps children become strong readers. It includes 20 fun filled levels where children learn key phonics skills including letter sound recognition, blending, and spelling. Each level is a mountain peak covering one set of letters with several exciting activities.
Do you need to be a proficient programmer to be able to get your children excited about coding? Well, the answer is no! Even though you might not be from an IT background or have any computer literacy knowledge, the need of the hour demands children to be capable of performing basic coding. Most organizations prefer hiring professionals who have some coding knowledge, versus those who have none at all.
This Blog is dedicated to all those parents who wish to be a guiding lamp to their children by steering them on the right path and encouraging kids to pursue coding as a hobby to start with, rather than burdening them with the pressure of having to study one more subject. Holding conversations can be powerful, so let us show you how to talk to your preschooler and middle-school goers to develop a liking for coding.
Children should be introduced to coding at an early age, as it is becoming one of the most important skills that one needs to have to make a successful career and understand the world around them better. The 21st century STEAM curriculum, which is used extensively across the globe & also in Dubai, gives parents all the more reason for encouraging children to practice coding.
Here’s what you can say to them;
Just as children get excited about learning to play soccer and taking-up classes to learn a new musical instrument, they need to feel excited about learning to code. How will you do this? Children naturally love to watch videos on YouTube, so explain to them in simple words, ‘you know, this platform was made by 3 former PayPal employees who were software developers namely; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim’. Another fact; to target the tastes and preferences of local audiences, you can even change the language preference of your YouTube platform, from English – Arabic (for those who reside in the Middle East) just by clicking on the settings button!
Also add that, Java Script was the language used as a base for constructing the YouTube platform and 98% of websites that we use today, have JavaScript language. This will get children intrigued about the different coding languages & enthuse them to know more. Who doesn’t like to play Candy Crush? But Candy Crush wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for some genius programmers right! Collecting candies is a rewarding experience, so level-up your coding game and pursue it as a passion, because, who knows one day you could become a famous Game App developer.
Anything that one can see & touch, is easily believable! Rather than treating coding as an abstract concept, you must try to tangibilize it. So, introduce children to coding toys that have certain modules that give instructions to teach the player to ‘construct’ & build ‘robots’. It is advisable to purchase a set before enrolling your preschooler into any coding program, so as to give them a sneak-peek and a kind of induction into what they are going to experience when they attend coding class.
CodeMonkey is an award-winning online platform, that teaches teenagers & children real-life coding skills. You can learn block-based and text-based programming through a game-like environment. Millions of students have enrolled to the CodeMonkey course not only in US & UK, but also the UAE and found multifold benefits. The best part is, no prior experience is needed to be a CodeMonkey student, and one can rely on the fully guided lesson plans that come along with the set. These lessons keep advancing as the child becomes more proficient with his coding skills.
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