Here at Little Scholars Playground one of our missions is to serve and give back to our young people. This week we volunteered with JA Worldwide as part of their Junior Achievement Business Builder Bootcamp, for students in St Kitts and Nevis 🇰🇳. We delivered part of the marketing programme for the students who are preparing to set up their own business.
JA Worldwide is one of the world’s largest and most-impactful youth programmes who have recently been nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. They deliver hands on, learning in work readiness, financial health, entrepreneurship, STEM and economics worldwide.
Young people are truly the future, so we feel that it is very important to provide them with the skills and tools to be successful in life, but not only that to help them build their own communities. We thoroughly enjoyed delivering part of the marketing programme and can’t wait to see what they come up with!
If you have time, we highly recommend checking out JA Worldwide and recommend volunteering if you can. They’re doing great things for young people around the world. You can volunteer within any country. We delivered our programme via Zoom to children all the way in St Kitts and Nevis.
Natalie is the co-founder and illustrator at Little Scholars Playground. She is passionate about literacy, learning, illustrating, Black women in STEM and Montessori.
We’re very happy to launch our NEW STEM activity cards today! The cards include 32 fun and easy Science Technology Engineering and Maths activities and experiments made with everyday items. Our unique pack of 32 cards makes learning STEM fun and accessible to all. Beautifully illustrated by us, with illustrated instructions and key learnings for each activity/ experiment. This product makes learning STEM fun for toddlers!
– Introduce STEM in a hands on way – Create a love for STEM subjects early on – Enhance a child’s collaborative learning, as STEM often encourages children to work together – Amplify a child’s problem solving skills, which is a critical skill in the early years – Enhance a child’s memory through experimental learning – Help to reduce screen time
The STEM Activity cards are great for:
– At home; homeschooling, screen free time, fun experiments and activities – In the classroom; station or whole class activities, after school activities, summer club activities
What is STEM?
STEM is a neat little acronym for Science Technology Engineering & Maths. One idea behind grouping these broad disciplines into something memorable; is to draw attention to an emerging policy choice within schools, focused on increasing educational interest within STEM. By stimulating interest in STEM early on, we can begin to motivate more young people to study STEM at an advanced level and to enter STEM related industries. This is particularly important for Black individuals who at university for example, only represent 6.2% of students enrolled onto STEM related subjects*.
STEM in early childhood
The idea of introducing STEM to children in the early years is to begin the process of creating scholarly minds. Little children who ask questions, seek out answers, solve problems and become innovators who go onto contribute to the human story. The sooner we get our little ones to see that our world is filled with shapes, materials, forces and numbers; is the start of something special, in the form of inquisitive minds.
Natalie is the co-founder and illustrator at Little Scholars Playground. She is passionate about literacy, learning, illustrating, Black women in STEM and Montessori.
Learning music helps with a child’s brain development. But did you know it also helps to improve maths skills? To play a musical instrument well, you need to develop your critical thinking and problem solving skills. These are key skills when learning maths. If you think back to early childhood, young children often learn counting through rhythm. They first start clapping their hands and bopping their head to a number’s nursery rhyme. We know kids learn through repetition which is why nursery rhymes are great. Young children are particularly responsive to rate, which is a key player in helping them to form mathematical skills.
Below are 6 ways learning music is beneficial to developing a mathematical mind:
1) Performing music reinforces parts of the brain used when doing maths because It’s about time signatures, beats per minute and formulaic progressions
2) The frequency of sound is related to maths, different sounds can be made up with different weights and vibrations
3) Studies show that children who play instruments are able to complete complex mathematical problems better than their peers who do not play instruments
4) Patterns are used in both maths and music
5) Learning music teaches valuable skills such as patience, research also shows that children who learn an instrument retain information better
6) Music is full of fractions. Music includes whole notes, half notes and quarter notes, all of which follow the same rules as a maths equation
Getting children used to music early on will have fantastic positive outcomes. It adds a fun element to learning and sometimes can get them to learn things without even realising it. Who knew that learning music which is lots of fun can help with improving a child’s maths skills?
Natalie is the co-founder and illustrator at Little Scholars Playground. She is passionate about literacy, learning, illustrating, black women in STEM and Montessori.
Our business is less than a year old and we have already been featured in a book! This is very exciting and we’re blown away. A big thank you to Garfield from Promoting your heritage for featuring us in his fabulous new book, Keepers of the flame: Saluting 100 Black authors. Garfield has been supporting and selling books from Black authors for over 20 years and it’s an honour to be featured in his great new book.
Black authors are very much underrepresented in UKÂ publishing. One of the key barriers is the belief that there is a limited market for diverse books, which is far from the truth. So it’s great that Garfield wanted to salute 100 Black authors who don’t always get recognised for their great work.
Natalie is the co-founder and illustrator at Little Scholars Playground. She is passionate about literacy, learning, illustrating, Black women in STEM and Montessori.
