The holiday season is about to end and we are all going back to school soon. This summer was a little bit different from the previous ones. We all wonder if the school year is also going to be different. This era of uncertainties might be stressing for many parents. In order to help you with it, we came up with 7 tips for back to school season.
Establish a consistent sleep schedule at least 2 weeks prior to school season.
Your kids love sleeping late and waking up late in summer, we know! Waking up early in the school season might cause lack of concentration and lassitude. For a better start to school season, make sure your kids have a consistent sleep schedule at least two weeks prior to the first day of the school. Not all kids like waking up early. Try to leverage gamification in such circumstances. Give him a present for each time he accomplishes to sleep early and wake up early.
2) Give them a hygiene tip each day.
Due to Covid19 wearing a mask, washing hands more frequently and using hand sanitizers have become much more important. With the school season, it might be tough for kids to apply all these tips by themselves and can cause stress. Therefore, tell them one hygiene tip every day with the detailed explanation of its importance. If he finds it difficult to manage, try to go on with gamification! For example, if he wears his mask and pays attention to social distance for one school day, give him a little present to appreciate his effort.
3) Set goals for school together.
School seasons can shift kids’ focus areas due to frequent homeworks and exams. You can set goals together to make sure that they develop themselves in all fields they like. Find goals different than homeworks and exams such as reading 30 books in the first term, designing 10 projects, visiting 5 museums or taking part in a social responsibility project.This way, kids can develop their personality as well as their skills.
4) Prepare a comprehensive shopping list for school.
As the school season gets closer, you may forget some important stuff due to high volume of to do’s. In order to make sure that you purchase everything needed, prepare a comprehensive list of materials. If you do not know how to start, Twin is here for you! We already prepared a back to school shopping list. You can check our shopping list that fits every age group here!
5) Visit your kid’s school together.
If your kid has just started school or changed his school, it might be a good move to visit the school together to swipe the worries away. Meeting his teachers, walking around the school garden and introducing him to authorized people might have an impact on decreasing his anxiety.
6) Meet the teachers before school season.
You as parents might have several concerns these days as well as your kids. The first guide you can consult is surely the teachers. Ask whatever you have in your mind to them and do not hesitate to take their advice.
7) Build a healthy meal plan for your kids.
Chips, burger and pizza! All kids love fast food, don’t they? However, having a healthy diet is crucial for a successful school year for kids. Two weeks prior to school season, get rid of junk food and change your eating habits towards fruits and vegetables. The kids might not enjoy this a lot. You can prepare a healthy diet bingo for each week so that he likes it as much as you do. For each bingo completed, do not forget to congratulate him!
If you want to enjoy this summer with your kids, keep reading! Even though it is holiday time, you can still learn and have fun with your kids. We have 8 different activities for you.
Twing prepares unique journeys including hundreds of activities for kids. They can discover their talents, design infinite number of projects or go for an adventure. With 138 skills and 6 different character journeys, they can develop themselves in their favorite fields. New activities are introduced each week so that they can go beyond their imagination.
2) Code your game together.
Coding might seem a little bit challenging in the beginnig. Twin Code Lab makes it easier for you. Twin Code Lab is a block coding platform that works on computers. It is simple and easy to use for a better learning. You can learn how to code with your kids and design your own creative games as soon as possible!
3) Design a robot that waves hand.
Building a moving robot or a car is exciting for all kids. Making their own projects enhance their curiosity and build self esteem. Twin Science Kits have electronic modules and craft materials with a guidebook with pilot projects. You can design your own robot at home and learn about basic engineering concepts while having fun.
4) Autonomous car racing time!
We know many kids love car auto racing! It would be great to make your own race with the autonomous cars you designed, wouldn’t be? Building an autonomous car might seem tough at the beginning. However, Twin Autonomous Car Kit gives you the opportunity easily design your own car. You can learn coding step by step and control your car with your own codes. First build your own autonomous car then arrange a competition. May the best one win! Let us know who wins, send us a message on Instagram.
5) Make your artwork with Spin Art project.
Coding, robotics and now it is time for art! Kids have interest in many different fields of art at early ages. It is very important to enhance their interest and give them a space to try. Summer holiday is a great opportunity to discover their artsy souls and combine it with science. Spin Art project is an introduction to robotics. You can design your own piece of art while discovering the science behind it. Buy Robotic Art Kit now and start discovering Spin Art and many more.
6) Design your first cartoon.
We all have at least one favorite animation. Have you ever wondered how it works? Thaumatrope project is the way to it. This summer, you kids can design their own cartoons easily with Robotic Art Kit at home. You just watch and enjoy!
7) Build a fruit piano.
Combine art and science in a very creative way! Choose your favorite fruit: Banana? Apple? Can you make a piano with these fruits? With Twin Coding Kit, kids can design inspiring projects and build their own music instruments. You can learn basic coding and design your own piano with Twin Control Center.
8) Give a secret message to your friends with Morse Code.
A code special for you! Sounds great, right? You can design your Morse Code project with Twin Coding Kit and send a secret message to you peers. By the way, we also have a secret message for your on Twin Curiosity Kit box. Let’s see if you can solve it!
Twing prepares unique journeys including hundreds of activities for kids. They can discover their talents, design infinite number of projects or go for an adventure. With 138 skills and 6 different character journeys, they can develop themselves in their favorite fields. New activities are introduced each week so that they can go beyond their imagination.
2) Prepare the lunch box and go for a picnic.
Kids can get ready for challenges of the world this summer. Prepare a fruit salad or sandwich together and go for a picnic in the closest park. Do not forget to talk about your life because sharing is caring. Tell them about your childhood and teach them the games you used to play. What about hide and seek?
A camp includes many other activities in it. While strengthening family bonds, you get the chance to discover nature and get some fresh air. You can watch a movie in the tent or observe the stars all together. Do you know which one is Ursa Major?
5) Feed the stray animals.
Summer days are going quite warm and stray animals need food and water more than any time. Caring about others is an important lesson in life. This way, your children grow up to socially responsible adults.
6) Grow a plant.
Teach your kids to love other living things. Plants are also a big part of this nature as well as animals. Growing a plant is the easiest and cheapest contribution to both world and your child’s development. Some kids might not find this interesting. You can leverage gamification and give a little present to the one that plants more flowers.
7) Make delicious cookies.
Kids love spending time in the kitchen with their parents. It might get a little bit messy but it is worth the joy! Try to get some help from your kid while cooking this summer. Make a shopping list and buy them together. Prepare the cookies and let the kids taste first! Do not forget to offer some to your neighbours. Enjoy!
8) Learn sign language together.
Sign language is one of the most frequently used languages. This summer can be the best time to learn it for your kids. You can start with Youtube videos or books related. There are branches of sign language. Discover the one that fits you best and start learning! Getting used to a language together will be a lot of fun.
9) Arrange a mini-olympics
Remember those days we were watching sports people and holding our breaths in the final rounds? You can bring the olympics to your house. You can plan your own race tracks with box games, puzzles and etc. Keep the results in a scoreboard and learn who the leader is. With such mini competitions, your kids can have fun while developing themselves to be a better team member.
10) Prepare a healthy diet bingo.
It is not very interesting for kids to taste new food. In order to change their eating habits, use gamification! Determine 10 fruits & vegetables and put them on a bingo table. You can give them little presents if they can manage to complete the bingo that week. For example, you can go watch their favorite movie or go for a picnic. Try to keep playing this bingo game until it turns into a habit.
BONUS! : Take a breath and do Yoga.
Get your yoga mats ready! With the current trend of going online and sitting for hours, physical activities gain a lot more importance. You can try simple yoga practices with your kids anywhere you want. While relaxing your mind, you make your muscles move. Yoga builds self-conscious individuals and teaches how to live in a peaceful manner. At early ages, yoga’s lessons are exactly what many parents should nurture their kids with.
The last school season was a little bit different due to Covid19. Many were closed permanently and online education period started. The next school period is expected to be quite similar. Some schools will prefer a hybrid system that includes both online and in-class education and some will only prefer online. These uncertainties might be stressful for many parents. That’s why we came up with 8 tips for a better homeschooling experience.
1. Let your kids give a break if they feel exhausted.
Homeworks are not the favorite things of kids. You may witness that your little ones feel exhausted and bored with the volume of tasks they need to complete. Educational Consultant Tonya Abari suggests to give a couple of days break in such circumstances. These breaks will motivate kids more and they will focus on their future tasks better. This way, you can ensure that your little ones do not lose their interest in school for the whole term.
2. Transform your garden into a classroom!
Did you know that kids who are engaged with nature develop higher self esteem? Forest school learning style is a method that provides active learning in nature for kids. You can find the green spots near to your house and turn them into a classroom where you can discover plants and insects around. Thus, your kids will have less focusing problems and develop better emotional intelligence.
3. The most important lesson: Teach your kids how to overcome challenges.
According to recent research made in China, kids have a tendency to feel anxious more while being homeschooled. In this new education period, encourage your kids to state how they feel and find solutions together. This way they can face exam stress and overcome obstacles occuring due to uncertainties.
4. Do hands-on activities with your kids!
We know that kids love experiments that sparkle and even more: exploding! For each field of science, try to engage the topic with hands-on experiments. This increases their interest towards science while being highly effective to teach them the idea behind it. For many creative experiments, you can check our free app Twing.
5. Make sure to have some “we time”.
It is important to have some time for family bonding as well as developing your kids’ knowledge. Each week, make sure you spend some quality time together and share about yourselves. You can cook together or design projects beyond your imagination.
6. Motivate your kids for teamwork.
Kids can learn how to be a great team member while making projects with their peers. Make sure they enjoy inspiring each other although they can only e-meet.
7. Make homeschooling enjoyable with different online education platforms.
Many education companies serve hundreds of activities and lectures for kids to learn at home. Depending on your kids’ interests and lessons at school, you can join these activities. You can have fun while learning a lot. We searched for 9 supplementary online platforms for you, check them out.
8. Set a learning spot at your home.
A phone ringing or an unexpected sound may shift the kids’ focus. It is important to have a specific spot at home for studying. You can make sure that there are no distracting stuff around such as TV. This way, kids can concentrate on their work better.
In this article, we have provided a brief interpretation of a thirty-page long research paper. Of course, some information is lost during the summary process. Link to the study will provide access for those who want to learn more about this valuable information:Link
We are all trying to choose the right educational applications for our children’s social, cognitive, and emotional development. Choosing these apps is a challenging process, not only does Apple’s iOS App Store have 270,0001 educational applications, the number of these apps grows by 5% monthly. In order to excel and take a responsibility to deliver the right solutions, application developers should remember the educational elements and inform their decisions with the science of learning.
In the article, “Putting Education in Educational Apps: Lessons from the Science of Learning”, Hirsh-Pasek et al. guide educational app and content developers with the principles from the new science of learning. The new science of learning is beginning to provide knowledge to improve significantly people’s abilities to become active learners who seek to understand the complex subject matter and are better prepared to transfer what they have learned to new problems and settings. This newly minted field asks not merely what we should teach children— that is, what content—but also how children best learn the strategies they will need to cope flexibly and creatively in a 21st-century world3.
The article introduces four pillars of developing educational mobile experiences:
Active Learning: Mental and physical activeness of the student.
Engaged Learning: Keeping the student’s focus during the educative event
Meaningful Learning: Introducing students to the science behind the subject
Socially Interactive: Allowing active communication with peers, family, and experts of the field if necessary
The application, which is based on these four pillars, should provide the student with a space to play and gain experience. In this scaffolded experience, they should be given a space that is both wide enough to explore freely and narrow enough to follow a solid learning goal.
So, how can we put these four pillars in an educational app for smartphones and tablets?
Ideally, it is necessary to be aware of the capacity of both mobile devices and children. Additionally, we need to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of mobile devices in different learning environments with different learning types. For example, smartphones are great devices for perceiving the environment. Thanks to all the sensors it has, we can use our smartphones as an amateur physics lab. On the other hand, children are great at questioning and exploring their physical environment, thanks to their amazing curiosity. So, If we want to teach physics, we can start by seizing the potential of both children’s and devices. Further, children can become physically active when using sensors such as accelerometers and cameras and might increase their cognitive skills by interpreting incoming data. However, in order to maintain their focus, it is vital to keep their internal and external motivations high during learning. Providing intrinsic motivation requires a quality experience; we must retain their joy of learning. Boosting external motivation is relatively easier, we can start our development process with gamification elements. Lastly, the stations on the student’s learning journey must form a logical route in sequence. All the people students meet on this route should give students active and constructive feedback.
In addition, we have a multimedia device that students already love and enjoy playing with. Mobile applications have a great potential in terms of accessibility of education; With their connection features and accessible prices, they reach places that computers cannot reach and can deliver education to any environment. This device has the potential to have a great impact on our entire lifestyle with increasing mobility and information availability which will naturally affect our learning styles. Therefore, educational application developers have the chance to meaningfully affect our lives and contribute to bringing education to the whole world with the new science of learning.
1 January 2020 Numbers
2 Putting Education in Educational Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning
The coronavirus house lockdown can cause anxiety, stress and uncertainty especially strongly by children of all ages. If your little one is faced with school closure, and experiencing a separation from friends, they are going to need support more than ever. We created a healthy routine that might help our children during this period using online education tools, apps and fun activities.
Twing is a free mobile application designed for children that exposes them to scientific content using games and fun experiments. Children play and learn educational games with each other and get inspired by their friends’ projects and experiments. It also offers children a digital classroom and community where they can share their projects and learn together. In these days, all students need to achieve well-prepared tutorials and contents. Using twing app not only provides you to achieve these contents but also brings you and your children together with other twinners. If you want to download the Twing App freely, you can visit Twin Science web site.
Wake Up Early and Have a Breakfast
It is very essential to provide self-discipline during the online education process. Of course, getting up too early as school time will not be easy for children. This is not needed anyway. However, it is important not to be late in order to maintain the efficiency of the day. Afterwards, not to skip breakfast, which is the most important meal of the day, will make children feel fitter and energic before starting a long day.
Plan Your Day
When we plan, we realize how much time we actually have. But an unplanned day ends up fast and be inefficient. For this reason, children should write down the activities that they will do by using pencil and paper. Using electronic devices will not be as useful as these tools. In this way, they always know the next step and can adjust their energy accordingly.
Morning Show: Egg Slime Experiment
This is a great way to save the eggs leftover breakfast. Starting the day with experimentation and creating something gives signals that a productive day has begun. Also, downloading Twing App provides you to learn the preparation of the experiments, tools that are necessary for it. ‘How to’ videos clearly show you the construction of the experiment. You can follow and download Twing to learn about other experiments and to develop new challenges.
Reading and Morning Pages
What do you think is the characteristic feature of the most successful scientists in their field? Yes, without exception, they all read a lot of books, some of them also write their own books. Combining these two valuable activities not only improves children’s ability to express themselves but also offers the opportunity to convey what they have learned in the book they read. Morning pages are creative writing workshop where every child writes what’s going on in his mind that morning. In this way, it both develops their vocabulary and helps them to use patterns that they actually know but unaware of it.
Inspiration Time
You can reach all the episodes of the Bilin Deneyin program, which has been broadcast on CNN Türk for a long time, hosted by Twin Science co-founders Asude Altıntaş and Cihan Özalevli, on the Twin Bilim Youtube page. During the day, children will, of course, want to spend time on the screen. In order to increase the efficiency of this time, it recommeneds to follow the contents of different projects, such as Bilin Deneyin. By the way, it can change their perspective about future professions.
Design Your Own Logo
Creativity requires constant experimentation, design and discovery. If you want your children to grow up with ideas and become unique individuals in every field, you should create an environment for them to express their imagination. This experiment is for inventors who want to push the limits of their vision. Drawings, designs, names and slogans. All are necessary for a powerful logo. Ask them to design logos for their future companies.
Watch Twin Online Coding Tutorials
Children and parents are confused, as education is suspended for a while. Twin Science started with the slogan ‘we do not interrupt education’. Twin started to provide coding training, which is normally paid and physical, on a free and online platform. This week, do not miss the online coding tutorials that will take place every day at 13:00 with the presentation of Cihan Özalevli.
Turn on the Music and Dance
Staying home all day can cause children to be unable to exhaust their energies. This leads to constant boredom. For a short period of time, turning on the music and dancing give them the opportunity to release their energy. Without a doubt, having a physical activity will make them feel good.
Watch Movie
The movie is a must for the holidays. In this process, watching movies will both develop their imagination and have fun. Watching movies together in the evenings will create a very lovely synergy in the family.
Plan The Next Day
In order to complete the holiday period planned and organized, it is very important to take notes about what to do next day and making a list according to your needs. In this way, this process becomes more sustainable.
Go to Bed Early
In order to get up early, going to bed early is important. Otherwise, they do not have enough time to carry out the plans they made the night before and they may feel guilty about that.
