Baby Animal Discovery Flash Cards 29 large, laminated flash cards featuring photos from Baby Dolittle Neighborhood Animals and World Animals videos. The set includes a Parent Guide and Teaching Tips. Appropriate for ages 1 and up Baby Animal Discovery Flash Cards is a new set of 29 flash cards that can be used in a traditional manner or in concert with the Baby Dolittle™ Neighborhood Animals and World Animals videos. The flash cards use objects that appear in these videos, offering you interesting opportunities to enhance vocabulary acquisition, concept development and word recognition. Teaching Tips are provided on the back of each card that will make for a rewarding learning experience for you and your baby. Parents Guide What makes babies and toddlers such delightful “students” is that they are incredibly curious about and delighted by the world around them. How a plant grows from a seed, which colors are in a rainbow and how a snowflake melts into a drop of water in your palm are all fascinating miracles to a young child. At The Baby Einstein Company, we work hard to provide great tools that parents can use to expose their children to beauty in music, poetry, art, science and nature. The Baby Dolittle Flash Cards are one of these tools. When a child first begins to decode the world around her, she looks at things in very large groups. If she has a cat at home, she may believe that all animals with fur and four legs are “kitty-cats.” One of the earliest and most exciting processes of learning comes when that child begins to classify and identify objects by category — then, when she realizes how to differentiate between these objects. One of the first groups that captivates a child’s interest is “animals.” The Baby Dolittle Flash Cards and the companion Baby Dolittle videos organize creatures into species within the larger group “animals.” In the videos, these animals are further grouped into general habitats (i.e. “animals in my yard” and “animals in the jungle,” etc.) We’ve created the Baby Dolittle Flash Cards to be used as a stand-alone activity or in concert with the videos At The Baby Einstein Company, we believe there is no combination more powerful - or more wonderful -than a curious baby, a loving parent and an engaging teaching tool. We work hard to provide important and stimulating learning experiences for parents and children to share. Using Baby Dolittle with your baby Great teachers create engaging and varied learning environments in which children both acquire and apply knowledge. In Baby Dolittle, we've designed a multi-faceted resource that supports several teaching strategies. Use the cards before watching the video with your baby. When the same or similar animals appear in the videos, point and name the objects. This approach creates prior knowledge that is reinforced and extended when the object appears in the video. Each card contains specific facts about each animal. These facts are arranged in order of “difficulty.” Share the facts that seem appropriate for your child’s development; save those that may be too difficult for another time. Experiment with new and fun ways to teach the facts; speaking in your own voice and style will make learning more natural and engaging for your child. Younger children will have fun making animal sounds. Hide the animal photograph from your child and make the animal sound yourself. Let your child guess which animal you are imitating. Let your child “test” you, too! Cover the photograph but let your child view the word associated with it. From a very young age, children begin to understand that particular combinations of letters make up particular words, and that those words have meaning. This is the first step toward sight recognition of printed words. Encourage your child to draw or paint his own versions of the animals. Print out the Baby Dolittle Coloring Book templates from our web site and let your child color the animal caricatures that they love best. Let your baby play with the flash cards. We’ve designed them to be incredibly durable and sturdy, and perfect for little hands. Older children can group the animals into categories like “herbivores,” “mammals” or animals that they have seen in their neighborhood or at the zoo. Teach your child the sounds that correlate with the first letter in each animal word. Let your child practice copying the words onto paper. There are three blank flash cards included in this box. Use these cards to attach photos of a family pet, friend, family member, stuffed animal or anyone else important to your baby. Most importantly, I urge you to have fun! Make learning a shared experience and a game that you play together. Enjoy this precious time with your child, and teach him or her to love and respect nature and all of its inhabitants; it’s a beautiful world out there. Flash card design On the picture side the word appears in simple, bold text. From a very young age, children begin to understand that particular combinations of letters make up particular words, and that those words have meaning. This is the first step toward sight recognition of printed words. On the back side, we offer Teaching Tips. These are examples of things you can say, ask or do as you use the flash cards. Depending on your baby's age and level of development, you can choose to use all of the tips or only a few. And by all means, invent your own. Whenever you have the opportunity, make the objects on the cards a part of your baby's life experiences. Words developed with Baby Dolittle Flash Cards cat dog mouse cow horse pig otter duck frog ladybug spider bee caterpillar dragonfly butterfly rabbit bird lion elephant giraffe bear squirrel fox dolphin reef fish sea turtle monkey tiger tropical bird Age 1 and up