A Bundle of Myrrh

Lily has struggled with writing. I’m not worried, she is after all only 3. But I thought this would be a fun exercise for her. “Writing” in flour. During “Quiet Time” I’ve started giving her options for activities, reading, crafts or using the time for a lesson in letters or numbers.

She had fun writing and drawing in the flour. It is a mess, but an easily cleaned mess, so it’s all good. Also, I wouldn’t use this flour for your next batch of muffins.

I’ve had more time to think about how the babies are playing and using their time. For a while now I’ve wanted to make sure that they are learning to be creative, imaginative and independent. All things that children are naturally if we enable them to be. It’s easier to let them sit in front of a screen and be entertained, but I know it’s not the best thing for them. There is a time and place for this, but I’m working on not letting it be a habit, which it has become.

To begin with, I’ve frequently been going through toys in order to weed out what’s not being played with but cluttering up the room, the stairs, the floor, etc. and put those away for a while. I’ve even thought about going “extreme” and putting away almost everything save a few good toys, the kind of toys that can “become” something else, like blocks for example. I think the less they have, the more they have to create, a great thing for everyone!

Even before I got extreme, I began to notice that the girls really don’t play with their toys often. They make them.

Meet Crusty the Crocodile munching some popcorn. Really, who needs a toy croc when you’ve got bread crust?

And for 30 minutes this morning they played with a bowl, some crayons and an empty tissue box! Amazing!

The dress up clothing is still a big hit and allows for much use of the imagination, so those are gonna be around for a while.

Prince Charming

I’ve also found some great sites that provide printable toys, paper dolls! I loved these when I was a little girl so we made some of these the other day and played for a long time with nothing but paper! Look Here, here and here, you can have paper doll fun too.

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2012 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Figuring It Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.