Babies love music, and music is good for their development. If you can’t carry a tune, don’t fret. There are lots of ways to bring music into your baby’s life. For hundreds of years, mothers have crooned their babies to sleep with lullabies, fathers have sung nursery rhymes to their toddlers and families have made folk music a part of everyday life.
Some people refer to us as ‘babysitters’ - but we’re not - not at all. We are child care professionals. A babysitter is someone (typically a teenager) who is not qualified at a college level to educate children. Babysitting is temporary. It is casual work, more often seen during nights and weekends, a couple times a month. It is often done to earn additional money and to provide parents with a break. A babysitter typically visits a family’s home and is only caring for a couple of children.
From ages two to five, kids make big leaps in all areas of development. At age two, they’ll begin to expand their vocabulary as they associate sounds with objects (“brown cow”). By age five, they’ll be able to string complete sentences together and use words in different contexts (“I saw a brown cow on my Grandma’s farm and at the zoo, too.”). Preschool helps bridge those gaps and paves the way for Kindergarten and beyond.
The preoccupation with numbers begins even before the umbilical cord is cut, as excited new parents, almost unconsciously, start counting fingers and toes. Before long, we begin noting “milestones” – recording first steps and first words. And while, by a child’s third birthday, mom and dad have usually stopped logging every developmental stride in the baby book, a new question begins to crop up: “Is my child ready for preschool?”
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