Little You

Online 3D anime character creator  - https://www.littleyou.ca/

[littleyou3d]

Parents Night Out

Grinch Day

December 15, 2021 - 6:00 PM

1301 N State Pkwy. Chicago, IL 60610

P: [phone]

Know more: https://www.littleyou.ca/offers

Parent’s Night Out Schedule

6:00 - 6:15 - Arrival and creative play 6:15 - 7:00 - Grinch Building activity 7:00 - 7:30 - Dinner (included with enrollment fee) & free play 7:30 - 8:00 - Little You creations

[littleyou3d]

The Importance of Creative Play

One of the most widely accepted notions in child development is that children learn through play. They learn to navigate their world through the interaction with others, including through playtime. Children have a variety of play encounters on any given day. Sometimes they are engaging in parallel play in which they play near another child, but not with them. At other times, they are fully engaged in dramatic play. Yet other instances see children playing with functional toys. No matter what a child is doing during play, play can strengthen their cognitive, social, and emotional skills.

What is Creative Play?

Essentially, creative play includes activities that are not governed by rules. Creative play can include making or creating something new such as art or crafts, but it can also include dramatic play. Creating stories and writing can also be part of children’s creative playtime. These stories do not have to be written on paper. Toddlers can create elaborate tales using only their words and imaginations.

Fostering Creative Play

You might be thinking, “if children learn through play, how can we foster that play to teach them the maximum number of skills?” There is no right way to play for learning. All play involves learning. We should help children feel safe trying new things, though. One way to do this is to give them a prompt or situation and let them use their imaginations to determine the ending. For instance, you might ask a child to pretend to be a police officer on patrol of the home or school. What kinds of things does he or she do? What situations do they find as they are patrolling? Children can be hilarious with this sometimes. You will be expecting the officer to come to talk to you or their friends, and the next thing you know, the police officer is fighting a dragon outside the school. It’s a very dangerous job, you know!

Provide Props

One way to foster creative play is to provide props. These props can be things like badges or firetrucks for service careers, crowns, and wands for royalty and magic, dragons, dinosaurs, and robbers for nemeses, or other props that can fuel the imagination. Do not be surprised if your child takes some innocuous-looking item and makes it a weapon or foe. You never know when that teddy bear might spring to life and try to eat your family. It’s a dangerous world we live in these days.

Provide Opportunities to Create Props

Building blocks, design bricks, and websites like Little You offer children opportunities to create the props children want in their dramatic play. Little You can help children envision themselves in their scenarios but create a prop that is similar in size to the toys. They might even choose to create several people and start a new town. Your daughter can be the mayor, or your son can be the schoolteacher. Whatever roles they want can be theirs.

Become a Character in Their Stories

Create your own person at Little You and jump into the creative play with your child. Become a citizen of the town. Try some role reversal during creative play. What would your child imagine he or she would be like as the parent and you as the child? These activities can really help children understand their world.

Resist The Urge to Correct

Don’t correct your child’s creative play. No, dinosaurs no longer roam bedrooms, but your child can learn about themselves and bravery during these activities. These creative playtimes need not be realistic. Adults are often far less creative as they grow older. Let your children remain creative as long as possible.

What Does Creative Play Do for Children?

Creative play is great for child development, as we have mentioned. However, many parents wonder what that means for children. There are many benefits to creative play. These are just a few of the best ones.

Emotional Release

Children sometimes need help working through emotions. This is especially true when they have stressful situations such as divorces, deaths, and moves to navigate. As parents, you probably try very hard to avoid as many of these emotionally difficult situations as possible, but life is full of unexpected changes. Dramatic, creative play can be an outlet for children. Their issues do not even have to be that significant. A fight with a sibling or friend can be difficult for them to understand. Dramatic play allows them a chance to explore their feelings.

Social Skills

Children who engage in creative play also learn social skills. No, officer unicorn is not real, but the situations that your child puts him in might mimic real situations. A traffic stop by Officer Unicorn can help your child explore what might happen in different situations. For some children, this can become a life-or-death situation as an adult. We hope it never comes to that, but dramatic play can help children learn to navigate scary adult situations.

Problem Solving Skills

When Firefighter Pat has to rescue Dino Dan from the rooftop, your little one can learn problem-solving skills. How would they get the dinosaur down? What equipment is needed? Why can’t he or she use some of the equipment? While this is not a real-life situation, it is one that might require them to think about their choices. This skill is transferable to nearly every other situation in life.

Final Thoughts

Don’t worry too much about wild creative play. Even the craziest situations can help your child develop skills necessary for adulthood. They will create and solve problems in a child-like way, but these skills will be invaluable as they grow. Let them have their fantastic play. Children and adults can benefit from creativity, but adults have all-too-often lost their love for the weird and unconventional. Let the kids keep it as long as possible. You might just rekindle your love of pretend play along the way. That’s never a bad thing. What kind of world will you and your children create?

[littleyou3d]

Building Your Own Belonging with Little You 3D

As they grow, children develop schema for the world around them — a general understanding of society that organizes people, places, and things into categories and buckets, so to speak. Societal stereotypes influence and often takeover these schemas. Unfortunately, this takeover is not always accurate, appropriate, or beneficial to the socio-emotional development of a child. In fact, this societal influence can stunt a child’s development, proving to be harmful to the child and even society at large.

Grace, a science teacher in North Philadelphia, in the beginning of the year said, “one of my favorite activities is to have my students illustrate a scientist. This is a pretty classic activity with somewhat predictable results. Children tend to draw a man in a lab coat holding beakers with brightly colored liquids in them. Sometimes the man has crazy hair, sometimes he is wearing goggles or thick glasses. Generally, this man is some version of Albert Einstein. From here, the activity progresses to revealing to the students that all they have to do in order to see a scientist is look in the mirror because they can be scientists, and in fact, they already are scientists!” The purpose of the activity is to begin to break down the stereotype that has caused them to rely on this singular schema of science and to begin to build themselves into that schema, even if it is not a long-term interest of theirs. It’s true that this is just an ice breaker for a year of science instruction, however it is extremely telling. This simple activity shows the power of societal stereotypes paired with a lack of representation.

Students need to see themselves or the possibility of themselves in everything they study and everything they learn. It is crucial that diversity is allowed, welcomed, created, and constantly reinvented within the classroom.

It is intuitive for adults to attempt to inspire students by encouraging them to pursue their dreams, and of course students should pursue their dreams! However, too often, those dreams are unintentionally interpreted and limited by the society that a child is raised in or around. For example, a young Black child who identifies as a female might dream of becoming a scientist. However, that dream is slowly muted as she learns about prominent figures in science such as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Niehls Bohr, Gregor Mendel, etc. Even Rosalind Franklin — a traditionally mentioned scientific figure — does not fully reflect this child’s identity or journey. What begins to happen is the internalization of the subliminal messaging that successful scientists — those who leave a legacy — look and behave a certain way. Although this is an example related to a specific subject area in school, it can be generalized to most other subjects and/or situations. The bottom line is that dreams can only be pursued to the point that their pathways can be designed and built; and pathways can only be designed and built if the tools to do so are readily accessible.

The team at Little You has thoughtfully created a free to use application accessible on the web that not only allows, but also encourages children to design personalized avatars that can then be printed using 3D printing technology and delivered to the user’s home. Little You has curated a thorough web space for young people to learn how to design a character that reflects their own personality, style, future occupations, or even the different aspects of their humanity. The web space includes instructional videos and user-created examples in addition to clean visuals and infographics that make navigation easy for any user. Once the character is designed, users can purchase a figurine of their character. The team at Little You will then print the character using high quality 3D printers and ship it off!

Little You is a place where young people can intentionally and safely ignore the boundaries placed on them by society in terms of how they are supposed to look in order to succeed at certain jobs, hobbies, and careers. Young people can explore their curiosities and identities and see those aspects of themselves come to fruition in the form of a tangible self-portrait that could look exactly like them or could reflect creative experimentation with their physical looks. Where society attempts to stunt their ideas, Little You encourages its users to explore the possibilities of their own reflection, supporting the notion that your dreams do not have to be associated with any particular form of self-expression.

The possibilities for classroom incorporation of Little You into curricula are multiple. In fact, the possibility for cross-curricular connections is extremely intuitive as students incorporate literacy skills to read and listen to directions, technology skills as they utilize the site and creative skills as they build their character. Teachers can easily collaborate to incorporate these characters into every subject multiple times a year.

Educators know that belonging is a critical part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on the path to self-actualization. Little You has created a platform that allows young people to create a sense of belonging for themselves. Furthermore, that belongingness can then go beyond an avatar created on the internet and becomes a tangible figure for them to own. This figure can then have a place in their life as a sort of trophy reminding them that they are the champions of their own dreams and ambitions if only they take the time to build a portrait of themselves into the roles they desire.

While society will continually attempt to dictate the manner in which children see the world as well as how they define their place within it, educators will find it is quite possible to foster an environment within the classroom where challenging societal stigmas is normal, welcomed, and expected. This will not be accomplished with a perfectly executed lesson plan or a thorough cross-curricular unit plan. This feat will be accomplished with the little things that teachers choose to thoughtfully incorporate into each day in order to build a mindset of belonging amongst each group of children that steps into the room.

[littleyou3d]

Growing Impact of Tech Usage Among Kids

More than two-thirds of parents in the U.S. are of the thought that parenting has become a lot harder than it was 20 years ago. And the majority of them cite technology as one of the biggest reasons.

Parenting is not an easy task. It never was and never will be. But the additional challenges that parents face with the introduction of technology to their children’s lives is unprecedented and most parents feel that while tech has made a lot many things easier, it has definitely added new setbacks to the already prevalent challenges of parenthood.

According to a 2020 report published by Pew Research Center, almost 66% of parents in the U.S are of the view that parenting is a lot harder today than it was 20 years ago. When asked, most of the parents from the group quoted technology as one of the prime reasons behind the behavioral shift amongst their kids.

Technology Impact on Child Growth & Development

In today’s day and age, we cannot simply keep away from technology. It’s an ever-present part of our lives and with each passing day, the amount of time humans spend interacting with technology is only increasing. It directly impacts kid’s tech usage as well. It is impossible to keep the younger generations away from interacting with technology.

Ask any parent and their top worry is- “my kid is always on the phone or he doesn’t eat unless he watches his fav cartoon show.” Kid’s screen time is one of the most debated topics. How do you decide how much is too much? How does it impact their child’s behavior and development? A lot of parents reach out to doctors and experts to get a piece of professional advice on the topic. Even the World Health Organization issues certain guidelines on how much time young kids should be investing in front of their screens.

One of the most highly discussed topics among parents today is how much screen time is perfect for the kids. And how does this screen time influence their development? Amid these growing questions, the World Health Organization issued certain guidelines the previous year on the ideal time that kids should be spending on their phones, laptops or other digital devices.

There is a growing concern about how technology affects children’s brains, bodies and cognitive and physical growth. The majority of societies and organizations working towards kids’ development have advocated putting a limitation on kids’ screen time. However, there is not enough robust research to back up the claim.

How Does Technology Affect Children’s Behavior & Social Skills?

There is no denying the fact that excessive use of technology during a kid’s formative years can have an impact on his or her growth. While some technology exposure is not bad for your kid, there are certain areas that are affected because of too much screen time.

1.Limits Critical Thinking

As we tend to immerse deeper into technology with each passing day, we see our kids spending more time glued to their phones, laptops or T.V. It’s no surprise that a lot of studies suggest a direct correlation between the increase in tech usage and decrease in daily reading time. This is backed by the fact that many text-based apps allow you to communicate within 140 characters thus limiting challenges to a kid’s critical thinking.

How can you overcome this?

Parents can define a limited screen time along with setting aside an hour every day to read from books, newspapers or journals, without any electronic device present. You can build conversations with your kids on general awareness topics. Interacting with them on their readings will help them develop a new perspective and they will be more interested in learning more.

Keeping an eye on your kid’s 24X7 is not easy and if you fear they might sneak out time to be on phones, it’s advised to introduce innovative and interactive apps or websites to your kids. Ask them to paint online, write an essay or frame a questionnaire on the latest news.

2. Reduces Attention Span and Imagination

With almost innumerable tech sources available around, it’s been noticed that children are often distracted and find it hard to focus on other activities when they have access to their favorite digital devices.

How to Keep it Intact?

To improve your kid’s cognitive skills and increase their attention span, it’s important to offer them the opportunity to delve into the old-fashioned imaginative plays and let them play with storybooks to run their imaginations. You can also work on their artistic skills with tech-inspired software that help them give shape to their imagination.

3. Puts Their Privacy and Safety at Risk

While you are worried about the impacts of technology on your kids’ cognitive and physical growth, be aware that the increased level of connectedness that technology offers us today can have a significant effect on your child’s privacy and safety. Then there is the risk of cyberbullying, which your child might be a victim of on social media pages or interactive forums that he/she participates into.

How to Make Sure Your Kids are Safe Online?

To keep a track of online activities that your child is indulging in is imperative to ensure that they aren’t involved in a virtual brawl or aren’t targeted by unwanted elements in the cyber world. You should also keep an open channel of communication with your kids to make them comfortable so that they can share any concerning conduct, they face online.

Technology is not a bane if used correctly. It has made our lives easier and has helped us learn so much more within short time frames. What makes it worse is the way how do you implement it. We often as adults indulge in some unwanted activities that we regret later on Kids are raw. They learn things by watching their environment. So, to ensure that your kids make the best use of technology, you need to keep your tech indulgence under check. Sit with them, read interesting articles with them. Encourage them to draw online. To sum up, here are a few pointers on how you can make the best use of technology to add to your kid’s wit and imagination.

● Stay informed about the latest digital trends that might interest your child.

● Keep an eye on what’s your kid is doing on the digital devices that he/she has access to.

● Push them to use their screen time for educational and informative games, paint classes, online discussions.

● Keep all communication channels open to discuss any issue your kids might face online.

● Go “digital-free” for a couple of minutes with your entire family.

● Participate in their imaginary play cooking shows, pottery classes, car races.

● Limit social media usage and set strict times for its usage.

We conducted some research on the impact of child’s technology, here is a Little You’s infographic we’ve collected from Statista.

[littleyou3d]

Dress-Up and Play: Benefits for Child Development

“Dress-up is not a mere child play. Experts believe it promotes creative thinking and develops communication skills in kids.”

All of us have grown up playing dress-up at some point of time in our childhood. What was your favourite pretend play? Was it a doctor? A vet? A scientist? A pilot? A parent? Playing dress-up as a kid is kind of a ritual that every generation passes through. It’s a common pastime among kids as it keeps them engaged in their own fantasy world. But do you know this simple play-up is actually laying the foundation to developing functional character attributes and relationship skills in your young ones? Keep reading on to learn more about the advantages of dress-up play and how it impacts child’s development during their formative years.

The world’s leading education design expert and the founder of Aronian Education Design, Karen Aronian believes that dress-up is an ideal way for young kids to foster their development skills. And she is not the only expert who thinks the dress-up play comes with numerous benefits. It not only opens them up to interact with the world but also keeps stress under check along with building positive relationships.

Dressing up is a type of imaginative play. Imaginative play, in general, is known to boost analytical, problem-solving skills and self-regulating prowess. Kids imagine events and situations and enact scenes that enable them to test out new ideas and deal with different behaviours in a comfortable environment.

While on the outside, the dress-up play seems just wearing a costume, in reality, it’s so much more than just that. When kids wear a costume, they role-play to get into the character imitating its tricks and traits. In this process, they also create their own unique mannerism and themes, which eventually pave the way for constructive imagination, experiment with different emotions while polishing language skills to communicate. Dress-up play, especially with other kids instil the understanding of teamwork, sharing and cooperating with peers. It also hones their conversational skills as when you ask them questions about their character and scenes, they explain it with their heart.

Listed down below are the top 10 developmental benefits of dress-up play for children:

1. Brain Development

Dress-up play often engages your child’s brain and memory. To play a particular character, they need to remember how it acted, what it said or how it responded to others. They put on their mother’s sandals and imitate their walk, meaning they pay keen attention to how their moms wear heels or how do they walk.

2. Decision-Making Skills

What character would they love to play? Who’d play the role of teachers and who’ll dress up as students? Dress-up play involves activities where kids have to make a call and take unequivocal decisions. This helps them in attributing character-specific roles to their friends and pick one for themselves thus, strengthening their problem-solving skills.

3. Instils Empathy

When a kid dresses up as a doctor, they look up to nursing their patients with great care. When they pretend to be a homemaker, they make tea for everyone around them. When they play the part of an astronaut, they believe in flying into space for better inventions. This dramatic play imbues the feeling of empathy within kids and they start to understand the importance of being compassionate to others.

4. Builds Their Vocab

Most kids love to imitate their character’s voices and dialogues. It opens up their chances of using words and phrases that they might have heard in their favourite movie, stories or cartoons, but would not use otherwise. They start using newer words in conversation thus, expanding their vocabulary.

5. Motor Skill Development

When kids get ready for a dress-up play, they often button a shirt, tie a knot for their superhero cape or zip pants up. This helps in promoting their motor skills. Further, when they jump like a superhero, run like an athlete or act funny like a joker, they further engage their motor skills.

6. Identifying Genders

For a kid, a hero is a hero, irrespective of their gender. When they choose costumes and characters they want to play, they identify and acknowledge the behaviours of those characters. So, if your boy loves dressing up as his favourite fairy, he is exploring and learning more about the other gender. Similarly, when your daughter dresses up as a firefighter, she is opening up to the idea of understanding the existence of another gender.

7. Social Development

While playing dress-up with their friends, kids often engage in cooperating with each other and taking turns to play their favourite characters. They make their own rules and agree on following those as the play is in process. This teaches them to accommodate and to be social while learning the give-and-take concept.

8. Promotes Imagination

Kids have an endless imagination. They are oblivious to the harsh realities of the world. They build their own terrains and landscapes when they dress up as their favourite superheroes. It opens up their creative minds and they grow up to be ingenious individuals.

Their imagination knows no bounds and with Little You software you can help them give shape to their imagination. It aspires them to utilize 3D technology in the most formative ways and keeps them engaged in meaningful exploration of their ingenuity.