Celebrating S.T.E.M - Technology

After hearing that Learning Resources was celebrating S.T.E.M this month, I thought that I would join in and celebrate it too. We love learning and S.T.E.M gives us great opportunities to do this. If you are unsure what S.T.E.M stands for it's Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Some of these areas of learning you may think are a little advanced for a young child but in fact they are all things that your child naturally has the ability to learn and will also pick up easily. 

Last week I decided to focus on Technology with Lily. Children even Lily's age are all getting really good at learning technology. In fact sometimes it scares me how much Lily knows how to use my phone, or turn on the TV and press play on the play station. There is no stopping it now. Technology is all around us and its something that children now need to get used to using. I do try and not let Lily have to much technology. She owns a tablet but she gets that mostly on occasions such as traveling. But there are other things that you can do to help your child learn about technology from a young age without getting them that tablet. So last week I did an activity with Lily which is a great example of that. 

I decided that I would introduce technology to Lily in the form of role play. Again this is something that can be done quite cheap. You may have an old telephone or mobile phone that they can play with and that is already a great start. I decided I would make Lily her own little office set up. I gave her a phone, a mobile, a calculator and I set up a computer that wasn't plugged in. All so she could role play. If you don't have all these spare things around the house, ask around your family. The telephone and calculator came from my mum. We were also lucky to have a old computer screen and keyboard and mouse we weren't using and so we could let Lily have these. But you could always do what I did when I was a child and make a computer screen out of a cardboard box. Children's imaginations are great and they will love getting to pretend to the computer is real. 

Lily really enjoyed the activity, she loved pretending to make calls on the telephone and loved talking away on the mobile. She has obviously seen these things be done by myself and other people and so she knows exactly what to do. This is also a great part of the role play to encourage children's speech and vocabulary skills. 

Lily knew all about pressing the keys on the keyboard and has always loved doing this as obviously she see's me do this a lot. She also knew about holding and moving a mouse around and clicking. It is really interesting to see how much she has picked up just from watching the things I do. The only thing I had to show Lily how to use was the calculator. As soon as I turned it on and showed her that numbers came up at the top she loved it and started pressing all the buttons. This part of the role play also really helps with maths as they get used to seeing the numbers. 

It really is such a simple activity that children can do from a young age to help introduce technology into their lives. I plan to pop all these items away ready to get out again for her to role play with.

Do you think it is important for Children to learn about Technology? Have you ever done an activity like this?