How To Help Your Child Or Teen Build Executive Functions Executive Functions are a cluster of high level cognitive skills that involve management and effective use of thinking skills. It’s a network of awareness and attention that includes planning, controlling attention, inhibiting inappropriate or ineffective behaviors, processing information in working memory, and other similar skills […]
cognitive development
IGNITING COGNITION WITH PLAY
Play is not pointless fun. For all people, but crucially for children, play profoundly supports and promotes social and emotional skills, self regulation, language and thinking. Most parents easily see that playing with others can help children learn to do things like interact, share and generally get on with others. It fairly obviously encourages children […]
THE GIFT OF BILINGUALISM, part 2 Effects of bilingualism in childhood and beyond
Introduction Understanding two languages, and often two cultures, gives bilinguals a broader perception of people and society: they are inherently more socially open and flexible and have a deep understanding that people do not always think alike. Alongside this practical advantage lies a neuro-cognitive one. Numerous studies have shown that bilinguals surpass monolinguals in cognitive […]
THE GIFT OF BILINGUALISM, part 1 Becoming Bilingual
Introduction (This section provides background information about language learning, skip a few paragraphs to “How children become bilingual,” if you wish) There is a small window of time in which a person can truly become a fluent native speaker of a language, and that is during childhood. Native speaker fluency means acquiring a language […]