My husband is out of town this week, so I’ve got babygirl allll to myself. While I am blessed to have family and friends nearby to help out, there are still many, many hours to the day where it’s just me and her, so I am SO THANKFUL that I trained her on blanket time these last few months! Not only has it allowed her to learn to play more independently, develop her ability to concentrate, and given her the space to develop skills she wouldn’t normally work on when playing with me, but it has also been a lifesaver for me! Each day, I can carve out 30-45 minutes of time to do my own things, whether it’s getting dinner ready, cleaning, or working on my own projects (*ah hem* blog). I LOVE IT.
It was just another morning at Gymboree when my daughter got her chunky little leg caught between two dowels in the small wooden boat. No big deal. I stood off to the side and let her struggle to free her leg while offering encouraging comments, “Almost! Ooh good try. You’ve got it! Keep trying!”
She didn’t cry out or complain– she just tried to pull her leg out this way and that. I watched her reposition herself as she tried to maneuver her way out. She nearly had it a few times, and I had to resist the urge to nudge her foot juuuust a little to help her out.
She continued to quietly work away at it, focused and concentrated. I continued to stand off to the side and watch. A few moments later, the Gymboree teacher was passing by, saw her predicament, and immediately leaned down to scoop her up, “Oh, you got stuck! Let me help you out–”
“Oh, no!” I cut in, from my perch on the side, “It’s okay, please don’t help her out. I want her to keep trying on her own. Thanks!”
It all started with the new student– we’ll call him John. He was not only new to our school, but new to the country. He would sit each day in class, silent and expressionless until dismissal, then saunter off toward his uncle without even a good-bye or smile. The kids tried to be friendly at first, but when their attempts were met with a wall of silence and blank stares, they soon lost interest. The students were generally kind to him, but one quiet morning, I saw his look of annoyance as a messy classmate’s papers began to crowd over and onto his desk.
John wasn’t able to communicate his annoyance, and also chose not to push the papers back over. Instead, he simply shifted his seat over to work on a smaller section of his desk. He avoided the problem. That’s one way to deal with it, I thought. I observed as the classmate continued to take over John’s personal space, and before long, John sat, frustrated with just a tiny corner of his desk space left. Finally, he turned and glowered at “Luke,” the offending space invader, with a, “Get your stuff off my desk” look. Luke just looked at him challengingly, then said, “What?” and then continued working.
Not gonna lie. This one’s for me. I currently have about 50 tabs open on fun activities to do with babies/toddlers between 14-16 months, and wanted to summarize them for myself and my husband. So I thought to myself, Hm. Where should I make this list? Microsoft Word? OneNote? Email? …I wish I could just put it on my blog so either Ben or I could find it really quickly on our phones whenever we needed. Oh heyyy… there’s an idea. I do actually search stuff on my own blog (especially recipes) pretty frequently, so I decided to compile my list here for me and for you :).
Anyone with a young child (or expecting to have one in the future) can benefit from this list! Experienced parents, pleasepleasePLEASEpleaseplease add ideas to the comments below! You of all people know how wonderful it is to come across a tried-and-true activity to change up the long afternoons with our little ones!
I sorted the activities into easy, medium, and hard. The easy activities are things you can do pretty much anywhere, anytime. They require little to no purchases or material preparation. The medium activities are still fairly simple, but require you to dig up some materials (scarves, clothespins) or purchase others (blocks, bubbles). Once you have the materials, though, you can consider it one of your “easy” activities. The hard activities are more involved– for the parent. They require more preparation (finger paints), cost (sand and water table) and/or clean-up. They are the kind of activities I would choose on my more ambitious days.
Parents: It’s your son’s birthday party. On the invitation, you wrote that the party would go from 12:00-3:00pm. It’s 2:00pm, and you’ve already gone through all the activities you had planned. You told the kids they could just “play” until their parents arrived, and now you have twenty kids running around your house wreaking havoc on your newly polished floors and white walls. EEK.
Teachers: It’s field trip day, and the bus just dropped you off at the museum entrance. For some reason, all the doors are locked and no staff is there to greet you. After waiting ten minutes, you call the main office and are told they’ll be there in twenty minutes. Your students are entertaining themselves– some sitting in small groups chatting, others running around and playing a violent version of tag. Chaperones make a half-hearted attempt to calm some kids down, but let’s be honest– everybody wants to be the cool chaperone, so they won’t go too hard on the kids. Their behavior is already spiraling out of control, and you have another twenty minutes to wait. EEK. What do you do??
Play a game. A simple, quiet, but active and FUN game! Sound too good to be true? Read on and try it, my friend, and be won over.
A few months ago, I led a teacher training on how to use a new behavior system in Sunday school at my church. I outlined how the system of consequences would work, with the consequences progressing from a simple verbal warning all the way to stepping outside for some time out. Then one of the teachers shared her situation with me, “What if the kids want to go outside? When I threaten to send them outside, they say, ‘Oooh, can I go now?’ as if it’s a treat!”
First of all, ouch. That is a low blow, and hard for any teacher to hear– especially when she has volunteered time on her Sunday morning to serve children!
Before I had a chance to respond, another teacher chimed in, saying that we needed more severe consequences– stepping outside the room wasn’t going to motivate the kids enough to stop poor behavior. Ack. This was not the direction I was hoping to head in!
I think I gave some response about the real purpose of consequences (not to punish but to provide consistent reinforcement of boundaries), and how we shouldn’t make kids behave out of fear. But I knew my answer was incomplete. I also offered an example of what I might have said in response to the child, but still… there was something more to it, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Shaping hearts shapes behaviors
Months later, I started reading Don’t Make me Count to Three by Ginger Plowman, and I saw what the missing piece in my teacher instruction was. I realized it was missing not only from that training session, but also in previous posts I’ve written on shaping children’s behavior!
Parents and teachers, this one’s for you. If you are regularly around kids, you know there are frequently pockets of time when you need to keep them occupied. Whether it’s the last few minutes at the end of a school day or you’re waiting at a restaurant, resist pulling out technology to quell their boredom and try this game!
“Guess My Number” is a simple, fun, easy, and educational game for kids 7 and up that you can play anywhere that you have pen and paper. It’s a flexible game, and can be easily adapted for young elementary aged children or your middle school math whizzes. I played it often with my fourth graders and they always loved it.
Teachers: this is a game that almost any child in any level in your upper-grade class can happily and confidently participate in. Parents: this is a great anywhere-game that will engage their minds in a way that is really fun for them while working their mathematical brains– parenting WIN!
So the test said POSITIVE and you’ve finished that terrible first trimester of “morning” sickness (total misnomer– the nausea can be constant!). Now you are into what most women find to be an enjoyable second trimester, and you’re ready to start getting that nursery ready!
You are not alone. I have a whole lot of friends right around that stage as I type. I literally have TEN close friends who are expecting in 2015– and that’s only getting us up to September! (And those are just the ones who have told me– I know there are more of you out there…!) Well, friends, here are some things you will want to think about before your baby comes. Some are to help you as you prepare the nursery and gear up, while others are just things you’ll probably wish you had thought about before you were constantly sleep-deprived and bleary-minded.
I was working through some of my old teaching stuff and came across some books I used to LOVE reading to my students (ages 8-11). These were the ones I knew would make them sit on the edge of their seats, hanging on to my every word. These were the ones I couldn’t WAIT to start reading to them, and the ones that made them howl in protest whenever I stopped for the day and inserted my bookmark. These were the ones that gave us fodder for rich and deep discussion on real-world topics– the stories they remembered years later. There are millions of wonderful chapter and picture books out there, but here are some of my favorites!
Note: My post does contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, you won’t pay a penny more, but I’ll get a small commission. Thanks!
Chapter books
School Story
(9-10 yrs)
While Frindle
This will be my last post about quiet books for a while! Thanks for your patience, friends. I know you’re not all rearing little ones, but… yanno… it was a big project for me so I’m still excited about it :D. But really. Last one. For a long time.
So I made 16 sets of this page. They are felt chain links that can be snapped together to form a rainbow chain. Kids can (quietly) practice their rainbow colors while getting some fine-motor skill practice in! Nice, right? The most annoying part was learning how to apply the snaps. It wasn’t hard to do, but I had to do some research to figure out the easiest and least expensive way to apply the button snaps, since I had (16 x 8 x 2) = 256 of them to do!!
Although it took a lot of time, I had fun making these pages!
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