Infant education

Re: Info needed abt Infant education

Hi Chinju and RajmiArun ,

Thanks for the replies. Since I am a working women I may not get time to cut and do the Flash cards., Still I will try to put max effort ..

Any other suggestion regarding this ?


Have a nice day
Regs
Suganthi

 

Mommies,

Have any of you heard about this infant education? This concept seems entirely new to me. All along, I have been telling my cousins not to stuff too much into the little brains and not to expect them to know too much for their age. Correct me if I am wrong, but if kids learnt rhymes, alphabets, and numbers before going to school, then what is kindergarten for? What do you mommies think?

Aspire SuperKidz and Little Gems are offering infant education in Chennai. They provide training materials (flash cards containing pics, words, numbers etc.) from 3 months to 5 years of age. The mother has to teach the kid at home using this. They say spending 5 mins in a day for this is enough. They say that baby's brain is highly adaptable during this age and teaching during this time brings fabulous and lasting results. They say kids identify musical instruments, fruits, countries and even learn math before they turn 1. Their websites are www.aspiresuperkidz.com and www.littlegemsworld.com.

I have a 2-month-old infant and my husband wants to enroll our kid into this program. He says the world has become competitive, so its not wrong if the child knows a little too much for his age. I want my kid to be a normal person with good intelligence. Will undergoing this kind of learning during infancy make the child become abnormal in future? Please do share your thoughts on this. If it is really beneficial, I would like to go ahead with this.

What I would like to know is:
Moms in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">India</st1lace></st1:country-region>: Have any of you enrolled your kids into these programs? What kind of materials do they provide? Has it benefitted your child?

Moms abroad: Do you have such infant education programs available abroad? If so, what kind of programs are they? What materials do they provide? Has it benefitted your child?

Whether you have enrolled your kids into this or not, please pour in your thoughts on this. It would definitely help me in deciding whether to enroll or not.

Radhee

 

Hi Radhee

I am a proud mother of my 2 year old daughter and I live in Uk now.I had been to aspire and also to little gems infant education. let me answer your question on the infant education system. I was also very much confused when I thought of this early education system but I heard a Jaya TV program by revathi sankaran and thought of going to little gems however i verified with aspire and they offered a course for pregnant mothers along with this education system,I went to aspire and took the package and that was the biggest mistake that I did, I waqs not sure how to proceed so I was doing at my will by showing some flash cards and I found her crying so I stopped showing coz i may be stimulating her brain too much. I did not get any help from aspire apart form the package that they sold to me. I did not teach anything to my kid until she was 11 months old and I approached little gems again when I saw my friends kid who participated in the Nasa robotic competition and did a electronic chip by herself when she was just 4 years old I was so surprised and i found that she got trained by priya and revathi sankaran from little gems I approached revathi sankaran and took the initial class for three hours and all the follow up was done by priya anmd even now I am in UK and i am able to contact them online through yahoo IM. I can see that my kid is very smart from others and lot of people are asking me what I did. All I did was to follow all the instructiuons from little gems and did it as per they said . Initially my husband did not allow to make another invesment for the package from little gems but he got so impressed when we met revathi sankaran and learnt this education system.

 

Re: Info needed abt Infant education

Hi

Thank you so much for this post, because of my friend and the good comments that i saw for little gems, i tried this education for my daughter. You can also do it by yourself ,infact i was over stimulating my kids brain too much by doing it on my own and she used to cry . because i was not aware of the methodology of the distance i need to show,the time etc that I need to show and other things but after learning it from little gems i have learnt itwell and i can really see the effect of this education.
Thanks for this forum people to give me all the guidence I need at the right time. This forum is very nice.:thumbsup

 

Hi Archana,

Thanks for your detailed reply. Nice to know that your LO has benefitted from this education. So according to you Little Gems is better...good. Do they give materials in one shot? Do they provide instructions of what to start when? For how many minutes do you show the flashcard to her and how many flashcards do you show in a day? Let me know if possible.

I wonder why there was no other response from anybody else inspite of so many views...

Radhee

 

Radhee - I read your post sometime back and didnt have time to reply. I am highly sceptical of such programs. I dont believe most of their claims and havent been able to find out what research (if any) they base their programs on since they keep that a big secret. We have a similiar flash-card program for antenatal mothers here and I havent found any significant differences in kids of mothers who went through that (could be any number of reasons for that of course). I dont think you can teach children concepts before their brain is mature enough to learn. You can teach parrot-like memorization at a very young age definitely but I dont call that real learning. I dont see anything wonderful about a 2 year old who can lisp a shloka/rhyme/song if she doesnt have an inkling of what that shloka/rhyme means. Similiarly by showing flashcards repetitively I guess its possible to make a baby memorize something. But what use is that? So I wouldnt put my child in any of these programs. As always this is only my personal opinion and it is a parent's right to do what they think best for their kids.
To clarify: I am not against teaching children at home. I teach my son all the time and plan to use flashcards for the alphabet (I'm making them myself). But the difference is that a parent teaching can pace learning to the childs interest/ability and make sure the child understands something before moving on.

Vanathi.

 

Looks like the DIY bug has bitten you too. Sorry for the threadjack Radhee, but can you post about your flashcard making experience. We bought one for colours for K, it is a flopshow, he is just not interested. Would like to save some money instead of having a flashcard collection, :rotfl.
Pls. Thankya.

 

Was actually going to start a thread for this in Toddlers Krithi. Will do.

V.

 

Re: Info needed abt Infant education

Krithika,

I think some kids are just not made for flash-cards. Even now A hates them and he had practised how to tear paper only with flash cardsRant. He'd prefer live objects to learn anything since he was a baby...

Latha

 

Re: Info needed abt Infant education

That's K alright... It infuriates him to no end. He has learnt Tam alphabets, gets most of it right. English alphabets have been eluding him - C for Caat is all he can manage, consistently. Read C wherever he sees it to my surprise.