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Monday 12 December 2011

Educational Toys for Babies


Educational toys are fun for babies and provide another tool to stimulate learning and brain development in your infant. There are many ways to teach a child and tens of thousands of educational toys on the market to help parents in the endeavor. The challenge for parents, child care providers and educators is to choose from the vast array of educational toys available in a way that creates a balance of learning techniques, is age appropriate, and most of all fun. This article will provide basic facts about; how babies learn, types of educational toys available and examples of each.


How Babies Learn



It is quite surprising the rate at which babies learn and develop. Learning begins in the womb and continues throughout childhood. In early life how a child learns centers largely around the relationship with the parents. At least until the child starts preschool, the job of stimulating and satisfying babys desire to learn falls primarily to the parents.



While babies respond to their parents voice there are many other sounds they find interesting. When parents are choosing educational toys for babies they should look for toys that have sound, colors that are bright and contrasted like red, black and white, and have interesting textures that babies like to touch.



Sounds



Babies respond to sound and some of the best educational toys include rattles and musical toys. Soothing music such as lullabies is usually best. Auditory and musical toys are known to stimulate logical thinking and imagery in babies and in adults for that matter.



One good educational auditory toy is the Electronic Metal Keys. These keys are good for a child 6 months and up. The Electronic Metal Keys are an imitation of the parents car keys. However, the Electronic Metal Key toy is safe for the child to chew on and has a push button that emits sounds like a car horn, doorbell, ignition, and remote control door.



Sight



Bright colors in educational toys stimulate babys vision. Look for toys with strong color contrast and patterns. A good one to look for is a colorful crib mobile that emits music, has different textures, curves and symmetry.



One such educational toy is the Bath Time Fishing toy. This item is appropriate for babies 12 months and up. Its a great prop to use during a baby bath. Making the bath as fun as possible can also help overcome any resistance or fear your child may have during the bathing process. The toy is bright in color, has a rod and reel, and the strong magnets attached to its tails allow for easy catching. Bath Time Fishing is priced at around 16.00 dollars.



Fine motor play



Fine motor play educational toys are used to stimulate coordination in babys finger and eye movements. One such toy aimed at developing the hand-eye coordination is Counting Pals, which is aimed at babies 6 months and up. Counting Pals are 10 soft and squishy colored blocks. They can be stacked, tossed, chewed by the baby. Counting pals also provides animal illustrations that will enchant the baby. Counting Pals educational toy is priced at around 12.00.



Cognitive Skills


There are some educational toys that promote cognitive skills in babies, which is to say they stimulate the childs memory, how they picture things and their problem solving skills. Educational toys like building blocks, activity boxes or puzzles are a good purchase for your child. The puzzles can deal with numbers, letters or pictures; it does not matter, but they should be fairly easy for a baby to grasp and manipulate.

source : articleworld

Finding Meaning in Life: Three Steps


So how do we find meaning? The first step is through personal experiences – experiences through something to which we are familiar and through someone we value. Develop your appreciation of beauty – that is heightening your sensitivity to beauty such as in great art or wonders in nature. The most important of all these type of experiences is the love we feel toward each other. To love another and to demonstrate this to such an extent as to allow your beloved to develop – and by doing this we will find that we develop meaning ourselves. Love is the highest purpose to which we can aspire.
Not to make the mistake of confusing sex with love. Sex can only be enjoyed fully when it is a physical expression of love. Maybe you will scoff but how many people do you know who are happy jumping from one bed to another.

A second step to meaning in your life is through creative values. Doing good, a good act toward a fellow human being – do it and see how you feel afterwards. Live life to the full, but not becoming busy. We are all guilty of running around with no time to do anything at all! No, become involved in a methodical and purposeful way, have zest for life. Get a project to become involved with anything creative such as, music, writing, art. something inventive.

The third way is your attitude. As the great philosopher said – it is better to treat people the way you would like them to treat you. Your attitude will bounce back to you. By going as far as – dare I say – not putting yourself first. We are all told to look after number one – it is all about you – does it feel good for you – what do you get out of it. Think about it – what would it be like if truly everyone thought only about themselves. A young couple about to get married they love each other – do they put themselves first? No – no they do not. However, give them a few years of marriage and both parties are unhappy because of me, myself and I. Do not forget your first love – return to your first love and discover the meaning. The attitude you give out to others will have an effect on you. To be positive and see good in everything takes practice. Being positive is hard work – however - negative thoughts will just happen all by themselves. Always I say it is down to choice. We may feel we are victims in a situation but you have a choice to stay in misery or do something about it – and it starts with you, with the three steps above and not looking to other to blame. Meaning to your life will not just happen it is a choice you must make.

source : articleworld

Internet Marketing Strategy Tips




Improving website traffic is a good achievement but this is not the final goal. Your business will run only if visitors are converted to paying customers. Improving conversion rate is very important because you can increase your sales with the same amount of traffic ("Conversion rate" is the percentage of visitors who perform any desired action).

Improving website traffic gives temporary benefits while improving conversion rate gives permanent benefits to your website. And to improve conversion rate, tracking your website visitors activities is extremely crucial thing.

You may have spent lots of money and time to improve your website and placed ads on major search engines to get more visitors and convert them to customers. But your internet marketing strategy depends upon where from your customers came, what they were interested in and some assumptions. You can better plan your marketing practices, if you will get information about activities of visitors who are converted to paying customers.

You may be thinking to put a survey in your website, which will give you information about some visitors.

Surely, this gathers more specific information about the visitors and to know what they were looking for. But again all visitors may not complete the survey and is this information enough to take a better strategy?

You can better plan your expenses, refine your website content, if you understand the activity of all visitors, i.e. which pages they visited, which page viewed how long, location of visitor, referral website, search keyword used by visitor, pay per click keyword matched the search etc.

Knowing the most viewed pages is extremely helpful, as it provides the interests of your target audience. Seeing the pages viewed for any visitor tells you specifically what these visitor were interested in. Did they go to the pricing page? Did they go to the FAQ section, or did they read testimonials? Reviewing such specific information can help to refine website content and you will be able to identify the areas in which you need to concentrate more.

How can I track my website visitors and improve sales?

Well, first you need to install tracking software on your website so that you can view the statistics. You can either use any well-known 3rd party script or you may hire any experienced developer to do this for you. If you ask for my recommendation, then I would prefer for using 3rd party script, which will be cheaper and easy for installation.

How do you better plan your marketing practices by knowing visitor activities of your website?

Visitors activities log provides valuable information like effectiveness of your marketing efforts, where from you get traffic, which page visitors like and which they don't like, which pay per click search keywords converts more visitors to customers, repeat visitor statistics, what is the busy time of your website, what is the software environment mostly used by your visitors etc.

And you can make changes to your website pages based on their behavior. You can change during least busy time, you can concentrate on most viewed pages and can ensure whether your website is compatible with software environment being mostly used by your visitors etc. This also helps to decide which keywords are most effective and which search engines provides better traffic. In additions, you can also take suggestions from experienced IT consultants by showing them the visitor activities statistics. SEO experts can better focus on keywords from which customer conversion rate is high, they can focus on the pages mostly viewed by the visitors etc. to improve traffic.

source : articleworld