Tags: young children

Practising Money Skills

Post date August 8, 2023

As a nanny, one of your essential responsibilities is to help children develop essential life skills. One of the most important skills is understanding money and financial literacy. By teaching children about money through games, activities, and real-world experiences, nannies can prepare them to make informed financial decisions and become financially responsible adults.

In this blog, we will explore the importance of teaching money skills to children, strategies for incorporating financial literacy into daily activities, and tips for nannies to help young children practise money skills.

Why is it important to teach money skills to young children?

Financial literacy is a crucial part of daily life that is often overlooked. Children need to learn how to manage money, set goals, save, and invest in their future. By teaching financial literacy skills at an early age, children can avoid financial missteps and begin building a solid financial future.

Furthermore, financial literacy skills can help children develop discipline, responsibility, and decision-making skills. When they manage an allowance or budget, children learn how to prioritise and make informed choices, which is an essential life skill.

Incorporating Financial Literacy in Daily Activities

One of the best ways to build children’s financial skills and ability to manage money is to approach it as part and parcel of everyday life, showing these skills in context and allowing children to learn from experience with a little- and-often approach. Here are some of the ways that nannies can help to achieve this.

Allowance and Budgeting

An allowance is a great way to teach children about money management. By providing an allowance and setting a budget, children learn how to allocate their money and make choices buying decisions. Nannies can assist in tracking expenses, helping children avoid overspending or impulse buying.

Playing Games

Games that involve money can teach children about budgeting, investing, borrowing, and saving money. Board games like Monopoly or The Game of Life or digital games, such as video games, apps, and online games, can teach financial concepts in an engaging, fun way.

Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping is a great way to teach children about budgeting and money management. Nannies can involve children in creating a grocery list, comparing prices, understanding coupons, and making purchasing decisions based on quality and cost. It teaches children to think critically and prioritise their shopping needs.

Going to the Bank

Visiting a bank or credit union is an excellent way to teach children about various banking services, such as opening a savings account, understanding interest, and making deposits and withdrawals. Bank representatives can explain the benefits of savings and discuss the differences between checking and savings accounts, and the consequences of over drafting an account.

Setting Goals

Teaching children how to set financial goals like saving for a new toy or future expenses is a critical lesson in money management. Nannies can help children plan the steps required to attain these goals, developing a sense of financial responsibility and accountability.

Tips to Help Children Practice Money Skills

As in all things, with money, practice makes perfect! It is important to give children the opportunity to apply and practise the skills they have learnt about. Here are some of the ways to do that:

Encourage Savings

Nannies can encourage children to save money by setting a savings goal and providing a visual representation like a savings jar, chart or piggy bank. Encourage children to contribute to their savings regularly and suggest reward systems for reaching milestones.

Make Learning Fun

Incorporate gaming or activities that teach financial literacy concepts while making them fun and engaging. Create activities where children can pretend to buy things and interact with different financial situations. Role-play scenarios like shopping or running a business can help children learn concepts like budgeting and making informed decisions.

Set a Good Example

Children learn by mimicking their elders, so nannies need to lead by example. Parents and caregivers can set the stage by discussing money matters in front of their children, such as budgeting, bill-paying, or health care expenses.

Encourage Charity

It’s important to teach children that money is not only for personal use, but also for helping those in need. Encourage children to participate in charitable acts, such as donating part of their allowance to a worthy cause or volunteering at a non-profit organisation.

Teach Responsible Borrowing

Teaching children about responsible borrowing and credit management can help them make informed financial decisions in the future. Discussing the consequences of borrowing too much money and not paying it back on time can help children understand the importance of healthy borrowing habits.

In conclusion, teaching children about money and financial literacy is essential for their future financial success. Nannies can incorporate financial literacy activities in daily activities, such as playing games, grocery shopping, setting goals, and visiting banks. Additionally, encourage savings, practise good financial examples, and incorporate charitable giving. By providing children with financial education, nannies can help set the foundation for a successful future and lead them toward financial responsibility and independence.

If you’re interested in how nannies can integrate education on a range of subjects like this into their daily childcare role, then our course Integrating Education into Childcare may be for you! This course looks at how young children learn and how nannies can support this through play in their day-to-day roles.

Creating a Pre-reading Environment

Post date August 2, 2023

As a nanny, you have an incredible opportunity to help introduce young children to the joys of reading. Reading is a critical skill that lays the foundation for success in both the academic and personal lives of children. By creating a pre-reading environment in the family home, nannies can help set children up for a lifetime of learning, curiosity, and exploration. In this article, we will explore tips and strategies for nannies to help toddlers and young children get excited about reading and create a pre-reading environment in the family home.

Benefits of Reading to Toddlers and Young Children

As well as the obvious benefits of boosting children’s ability to read when the time comes and providing a pleasurable pastime, there are many benefits of promoting pre-reading skills which impact on children’s overall wellbeing and different areas of development. Here we explore some of those:

Enhances Language and Cognitive Development

Reading plays an essential role in the language and cognitive development of young children. It exposes them to a broad range of vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax, which helps build their language skills and comprehension abilities.

Develops Imagination and Creativity

Reading provides an escape from reality and opens up new worlds of imagination and creativity. It allows children to explore new ideas, places, and perspectives, nurturing their minds with a deeper understanding of the world around them.

Cultivates Critical Thinking

Reading promotes critical thinking and problem-solving. Through reading, children learn to analyse information, draw conclusions, and apply knowledge to specific situations, all of which are critical analytical skills that will benefit them throughout their lives.

Sparks Curiosity and Love for Learning

Reading helps foster a love for learning and a thirst for knowledge in children. It encourages them to explore new interests and topics, expand their minds, and pursue lifelong learning.

How to Create a Pre-Reading Environment in the Family Home

Nannies have the unique position of providing children with early care and education in a home environment. There are many ways that the home environment can be leveraged and enhanced in order to support pre-reading skills. These are some of the ways that nannies can create a pre-reading environment in a family’s home.

Provide Age-Appropriate Books

Provide age-appropriate books for children to read, engage and immerse in stories. Ensure that you have a variety of books that cater to different interests, reading levels, and genres to promote curiosity and exploration.

Create a Dedicated Reading Space

Creating a dedicated reading space in the home helps to set the tone for reading as a consistent activity. The reading space can be cosy with colourful pillows, comfortable chairs, or bean bags in a quiet and well-lit room, warding off distractions and maximising the reading environment.

Read Aloud

Reading aloud to children helps develop their language skills, increase their vocabulary, and develop their comprehension and critical thinking skills. Encourage and engage children to participate in the reading process by asking them questions and allowing them to interact with the story.

Set a Positive Reading Example

As a nanny, setting a positive reading example within the family is crucial! Children tend to be influenced by the behaviours of their caretakers, seeing them reading and enjoying books helps encourage children to become avid readers themselves.

Encourage a Love for Libraries

Visiting the library is a perfect way to show children the world of literature, offers access to an abundance of books, and is an excellent way to expose young children to the world of literature. Encouraging visits to the library, borrowing books and attending library programmes can further foster a passion for reading in children.

Make It Fun

Making reading fun is the key to keeping children engaged and excited about it. Incorporating fun activities like puzzles and colouring pages related to the books they’ve read, costumes or acting out scenes from books, and drawing and writing their own stories based on their favourite books, all of which promote imagination and creativity in children.

Activities to Encourage Reading in Young Children

If you would like to plan and carry out some specific activities to support children’s pre-reading skills in your role as a nanny then here are some good ideas:

Role-playing and Storytelling

An excellent way to engage children in reading is through role-playing and storytelling. Encouraging children to act out scenes from their favourite stories, or even create their stories, helps them to develop their imagination and helps in language development.

Library Scavenger Hunt

Going to the library and organising a scavenger hunt can help children discover new books and exploration of the library while having fun. Children can search for specific books, and find different genres of books, topics, or authors, to promote curiosity and exploration.

Educational and Interactive Apps

Interactive and educational apps for phones or tablets can be a fun and engaging way to introduce new stories and promote reading skills. There are various reading apps available that help children improve their reading skills, vocabulary, and comprehension abilities while making learning fun.

As a nanny, creating a pre-reading environment in the family home is a crucial step in fostering a love for reading in toddlers and young children. By providing age-appropriate books, creating a dedicated reading space, reading aloud, setting a positive reading example, encouraging a love for libraries, and making reading fun, nannies can ignite the spark of curiosity and imagination in children. Engaging in activities like book clubs, role-playing and storytelling, library scavenger hunts, movie nights, audiobooks, and educational apps can further enhance the reading experience for young children.

By investing in developing literacy skills, nannies can help set the foundation for a lifetime of learning, encourage critical thinking and imagination, and help preschoolers and young children become well-rounded individuals. This is a vital part of your role when working as a nanny. If you want to become more confident and knowledgeable when supporting children’s development in a range of different areas, our Early Years Childcare course will help you gain insight into the different areas of learning and how these can be supported at various ages and stages of development. Visit us today at www.international-nanny.institute to learn more.

Natural Sleep Rhythms for babies, toddlers and young children

Post date April 25, 2023

Sleep seems to be one of the hot topics of parenthood, and with good reason; we all need sleep to be happy, healthy and functional and so do children.

Nannies are often asked for advice and support with children’s sleep, so it’s important to be educated on what is normal, and expected and how we can support families to get the sleep that they need.

Sleep is especially important for children in the early years of life who are in a stage of rapid physical and cognitive growth, but their sleep doesn’t always look like we expect it to or fit neatly with their parents’ sleep needs, and this can be both tiring and frustrating.

Humans’ natural sleep rhythms change throughout our lives, so it’s unlikely that a baby, toddler or young child is being deliberately difficult, or that anything is ‘wrong’ with them or their sleeping habits. It’s more likely that their natural sleep rhythm, or ‘body clock’ is simply out of sync with the needs of the adults in their lives.

Here we explore natural sleep rhythms at different ages and what we, as nannies, can do to ‘hack’ these to support parents and get the most out of children’s sleep patterns.

What is the body clock?

The body clock is a term that we often hear as adults and a great example of how the body clock works can be seen when we consider how older adults who have spent their working lives waking at 7 am to get ready for work find that in retirement they continue to wake naturally around 7 am even though they don’t need to.

When we repeatedly wake up at the same time for work or school, our bodies fall into a rhythm of wake and sleep that coincides with this.

This is often referred to as ‘the body clock’ and it’s why we experience jet lag when travelling because when we travel to different time zones our bodies are forced into waking or sleeping at different times to those they have come to expect.

What is the science behind this?

Behind the experience of the ‘body clock’ there are two bodily systems that largely regulate our sleep. These systems are the circadian biological clock and sleep/wake homeostasis. These two systems together mean that we experience fluctuating levels of sleepiness and alertness throughout the day and night.

Sleep/wake homeostasis is the system that helps us to feel sleepy and sense the need to sleep at night to make up for our activities during the day. This system is designed to balance our sleep and wakefulness.

The circadian biological clock, on the other hand, is responsible for regulating the timings of alertness throughout a 24-hour period. This means that we often have periods of higher and lower alertness as we go through the day and night.

For adults, the pressure to sleep is greatest between 2 and 4 am, and between 1 and 3 pm. When we are sleep-deprived, the urge to sleep in the afternoon is much stronger, but when we are well-rested we may not even notice this.

Natural sleep rhythms for newborn babies

As nannies, when we hear the phrase “sleeping like a baby” we can conclude that whoever invented this phrase, probably didn’t have a baby.

Newborn babies, from 0 to 3 months, typically don’t have great nighttime sleep, instead for newborns, sleep can occur day or night, and most newborns will total about 18 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period.

However, this doesn’t always occur in long blocks or exclusively at nighttime, and plenty of babies have their day and night muddled up!

Most babies need to learn the difference between daytime and nighttime, and set their circadian biological clock to meet their sleep needs.

However, newborns can’t be forced to sleep at the right time. Instead, nannies can support parents by gently encouraging newborns to differentiate between day and night.

One way to do this is to make daytime and nighttime very separate experiences; The daytime should be light and bright with all the usual comings and goings of the day, plenty of natural light in the house, and lots of interaction.

Taking a walk outside during the day will also help as even at this age exposure to different amounts and types of light affects the hormones that our bodies produce.

Evening and nighttime on the other hand should be dimly light, and quieter with less playful interaction. This helps the body to produce melatonin, which makes humans feel sleepy.

Natural sleep rhythms for infants

Most nannies are familiar with, or have at least heard of, the 4-month sleep regression.

Around this time, babies will typically become more aware of their surroundings and find it more difficult to get to sleep as they are busy finding out more about the world.

This stands at odds with the fact that they still need plenty of sleep and will need to take up to 4 naps a day, gradually decreasing to just 1 or 2 as they approach their first birthday.

Some babies may begin to sleep through the night during this period of time, but this is not a universal trait, and the majority of babies still wake for feeds throughout their first year.

This is normal and a protective factor against SIDS.

In fact, humans used to have a period of time awake in the middle of the night, with 2 blocks of sleep either side up, so sometimes we see this evolutionary hard-wiring reflected in infant sleep patterns.

This can be difficult for parents to deal with, so nannies must work hard to reassure parents that this is very normal and that it is not their fault.

Natural sleep rhythms for toddlers

Toddlers, from about 1 to 3 years old, need about 11–14 hours of sleep per 24-hour period, but this won’t occur as one solid block of sleep, so napping in the afternoon is still important at this stage.

Having a nap in the afternoon works with the circadian biological clock, as it is around this time that we experience natural sleepiness.

An afternoon nap is a simple way to make sure that toddlers are getting the rest they need without the pressure to sleep in a huge block at night.

The nap should occur as close to the same time every day as possible to help set and keep a regular circadian biological clock.

Nannies can help parents to set and maintain a solid nap schedule to ensure that children are getting the sleep they need.

Natural sleep rhythms for young children

Between the ages of 3 and 5 young children need to sleep between 11 and 13 hours.

This might all happen at night, or they may maintain an afternoon nap, though this gradually gets shorter and generally stops before age 5. This age group is particularly sensitive to different colours of light, so this is a good way that nannies can help parents to ‘hack’ preschoolers’ sleep rhythm.

Blue light such as that from a computer, tablet or television screen can cause wakeful hormones to rise and make it more difficult for young children to sleep.

Nannies can ensure that screens are limited in general, but particularly in the hour before bedtime, in order to help young children to fall asleep more easily.

The blue light filters on devices can also be used to help keep blue light to a minimum throughout the day.

Nannies may also be familiar with the concept of ‘bedtime protest’, which is particularly characteristic of this age group and is where children refuse to go to bed at the time set by parents; this might result in children having tantrums, becoming very distressed or simply exhibiting challenging behaviour.

Some of this is likely to be a boundary-pushing behaviour, but it may also be the effect of the inbuilt circadian biological clock conflicting with modern or cultural schedules.

For example, whilst many societies expect children to go to bed at about 7 pm, other cultures, like that in Spain, allow children to stay up much later and enjoy extra time with the family whilst having an extended sleep in the afternoon called ‘siesta’.

However, since other societies are arranged to have children awake during the majority of the day and asleep all night ready to wake early, adjusting their biological circadian clock to be more compatible with our needs and expectations may be necessary.

Some of the tips here may be helpful, or you may want to check out our blog post on sleep tips to help babies, toddlers and young children to get a good night’s sleep.

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