By Micky Afnan, Educator and Creator of the Table-Time Look & Learn tablecloth         

All parents want the best for their children. Now more than ever, our little ones need to develop reading, math, and social skills as well as the self-confidence to succeed in the world marketplace.

While most children don’t start formal schooling until kindergarten, research shows the education they receive during their first five years is critical for their future academic preparedness.  From numbers to shapes to high frequency sight words, school districts expect children to arrive with a basic knowledge in key content areas.

But where is the time these days, when both parents often have careers, and then must focus on household responsibilities, dinner, and baths . . . before finally landing in bed, exhausted and unable to squeeze in one more thing?

What if learning opportunities were integrated into everyday activities through meaningful mealtime conversations?  What if little ones could digest knowledge and dinner at the same?  What if busy parents could nurture their child’s growth, development, and academic preparedness without the struggle to find extra time?  Those were the thoughts that inspired me to put pencil to paper and create the initial characters and content that became the Table-Time tablecloth.

Table-Time tablecloths offer Common Core conforming content all around your child's plate.  The tablecloths provide a low-tech/high impact teaching tool that allows you to work with your child on strategically focused learning outcomes in a relaxed way that is intertwined with your everyday normal activities of daily living – such as eating meals.

Where most learning tools require an extra block of time to guide the child through the process, education can now be enjoyed as part of the meal-time conversation with meaningful and productive outcomes.   It promotes the most fundamental learning experience for children in the first 5 years of their development – which is face-to-face communication and artful conversation with their parents and other primary care givers – around the breakfast or dinner table.

This is all about bringing back and stimulating the natural conversation of the very content our children need to acquire at the kindergarten age -  at the family dinner table.  I hope you love using this as much as I loved creating it.  

Enjoy!