Importance of sensory play

Children are programmed to receive and utilize sensory inputs from day 1. Children need to have their senses (touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing) engaged to create a meaning for their experiences. It primarily helps in brain development by creating classifications and associations, thus leading to cause and effect. Moreover, it is all the more important for toddlers and preschoolers whose language is just beginning to develop. Because, sensory experiences will also pave way for language expression and development. As parents and caregivers, it is our job to help them explore their senses by providing appropriate activities for sensory play. Below, we will discuss some of the ideas for sensory play.


1. Touch – We all have a lot of ideas about how we can use touch as part of sensory play. It mainly helps in developing fine motor skills for toddlers. Sand, Water and Play-doh are popular among kids. But we can also explore on other day-to-day items. The challenge is how out-of-the-box our thinking is in order to create an interesting sensory play experience for the kid. Some of them are rice, sugar, shaving foam or cream, ice cubes, leaves, jelly or jams, different textured papers, cloth materials etc.. (please feel free to add anything that you can think of which I’ve missed)

Sensory play with colored rice

Playing with shaving foam

Pal playing with soap bubbles; In case you're wondering what's that below his nose, its my kajal that he's wearing like a mush

2. Sight – Sight constitutes anything the child sees. But don’t just stop with pointing out things. Get into the details. For e.g. if you are showing the child birds that are flying, also point out how different birds fly at different speed and how they use their wings to fly etc. Take kids for nature walks and help them notice different things. Even a small insect or an ant is an observation worth it for the kids. But please don’t confuse this with watching TV. :-)

3. Smell – This particular sensory activity is not given much of an importance to kids as much as we do with touch and sight. If you think about it, a lot of our childhood memories would be associated with a particular smell. A visit to a relative’s house, a special snack made by your grandma etc. Kitchen is one of the best places to start with for younger kids. Make them smell coffee, turmeric and other items and you can explain how certain things have a strong smell while others don’t. Nature walk can help here too. Make them smell different flowers. The smell of sand during the first showers of monsoon. You can find plenty of ideas. But when it comes to smell, the children will not be as eager as touching or tasting. So we have to first initiate and explain how we feel when we smell those flowers or a favorite dish etc.

4. Taste – Children have an urge to taste things right from when they were babies. It is their natural instinct to put those things in their mouth, which their hands can pick. They try to understand the nature of a particular stuff by putting it into their mouth. We can give kids different kinds of food stuff so that they try to understand how they taste. The flip side could be that some kids might start disliking a few of them. But nevertheless, this is a fun exercise to do. And if you have an older kid, why not let him/her make a dish and have a tasting session? Also if you have curious kids surrounding you when you are working in the kitchen, why not let them experience the raw taste of certain items like tamarind, salt, ginger etc. (definitely not chilies, please)

5. Hearing – This is also one particular sense I’d not underestimate, especially with my boy telling me which reverse sound belongs to which car in our apartment. Music plays a very important role in terms of hearing sensory. Expose your kids to different kinds of music. Thankfully our country is so diverse that we listen to classical to film songs to hip hop. Have a dancing session where you can sing and dance along with your kid. Another fun game is to have a quiz on identifying the birds chirping and animal noises.

Sensory play has lifelong benefits of learning for kids. It’s up to us to provide them the right kind of materials and environment that is both safe and fun. Please feel free to share your ideas and what you’ve done with your kids.

Time Off!

I know it’s been quite some time since my previous blog. My hubby, R went to the Himalayas for 10 days and I went to my mom’s place to take a lil bit time off my mommyhood. We all become such lazy bums at mom’s place. So I was watching TV, catching up on some reading had lots of time to sleep, didn’t cook for full 10 days. But now life’s back to those normal routine days.

At my mom’s place I saw all the TV I can – neengalum vellalam oru kodi (I never saw this before and wanted to see how Surya hosts), super singer, movies, news channels etc. and Pal got to watch lots of cartoons and ended up watching lots of fighting scenes (which was the bad part). What’s so special about this? You may wonder, well we do not have a TV at home. It was a combined decision by R and myself that we’ll not buy a TV. It’s been close to a year since we moved to our house and we are still going strong.

And so I was wondering, not having TV actually makes a world of difference to our lives. One, whether it affects Pal or not I end up watching all the crap and thus exposing him to it too. Also I may not have gotten all this time to spend with him, do activities with him if that time goes to TV time. We spend lot of time playing, drawing, telling stories and most of all reading. Pal loves books and loves to be read to before his nap time as well as before hitting the bed in the night.

Another important reason pediatricians recommend not to expose kids to television is no matter how educational and kid friendly it is, it is a very passive medium. Kids learn best when they put all their senses into it like touching, feeling, smelling, moving etc. Even audio is fine as it improves their creativity.

But that doesn’t mean that he does not experience any screen time. I show him stuff in you tube, download some movies and he watches rhymes in the boom box. But otherwise he gets to listen to a lot of songs since my source of entertainment too is from radio and the internet ofcourse. When we tell this to people, some of them react as though life without TV is just not possible. But we are so used to it now.

Also I realised that most of the time we only waste our time flipping through channels and not watching anything properly. And news channels? They are much worse than reality shows. So in case any of you are wondering if your child is too adddicted to the TV, please sell it off. Our lives will still go on without it.

Ps: If your husband insists that he’ll miss his IPL, tell him he can anyway watch it online ;-)

swetha

Why do we stop learning?

How many of us as parents make our children do homework, send them to tuitions, and blame them for not understanding their lessons. Why do we have to treat learning which is a natural thing for the human mind into such a chore? Coming to think of that, when did we last learn something for the sake of learning? After we get into our jobs, we only think about money and job position. I once met a maths teacher who teaches math for primary classes. I was telling her about the website khanacademy.org and how it helps understand math concepts in a simpler way. And the reaction I got from her was ‘chal forget it, it’s boring, I keep doing this day in and day out’. I was surprised by that comment from a teacher. And it made me wonder, if teachers teach because they want the kids to learn or just listen to what they have to say?

I was never thinking about teaching until recently. But I come to understand that to teach, you first have to be open to learn. How can u inspire a child to learn when you yourself are not open to the concept? When I’m talking about learning, it’s not just about the subject that you teach but also try to learn how the child understands what u teach. And I’m not talking just about a school environment; it can even be the day to day teaching that you do as a parent for your child. Even when we discipline the kid, we only want the kid to listen to us but don’t really bother about why he should learn a certain behavior or why something is bad.

I know I can just go on about this, but the other day I was playing Mega Bloks with my boy, he made something out of 3 blocks and proudly announced ‘Amma, look four’. I was really looking in awe as to how he was able to perceive a number by fixing a few blocks. So after that we both tried to make a few alphabets and numbers through the blocks.

PAL completed two years recently and one of the gifts he got was the alphabet and number puzzle made out of foam board. So I was removing the alphabets and making him fix it into the right board. After sometime he was playing by himself while I moved on to do some other work. He comes out from his room and shows me alphabet ‘V’ upside down and told me ‘Amma, pant’. I was almost on tears. I then learnt that there are absolutely no rules or boundaries to learn, the difference it takes is just in our minds.

It's so beautiful how kids learn in the most unconventional way, through play, through music, through conversation, by asking questions and it just gives us more responsibility to give them a more conducive environment for them to learn than confine to the conventional parenthood which comes with the mindset that 'i'm now a parent and hence i don't have to learn anything, its only my child's duty to learn.' When we as parents inspire our kids to learn, why would our kids treat learning a chore?

PAL and myself made this Car Park for all this cars, he takes reverse of the cars he wants outside by humming reverse tunes similar to his dad's car :-)

Lessons through storytelling

Offlate I’ve been so taken by this whole concept of storytelling. PAL loves stories and he loves hearing the same story again and again and again. Sometimes I get so bored, but he doesn’t. There are some situational stories that I make up for him to brush his teeth and drink his milk. He started going to playschool and I had to make the morning chores of waking him up, brushing his teeth, drinking milk an easy experience for both of us without leading to any power struggles or conflicts. Hence one fine morning I just came up with a story for making him brush his teeth:

“Once Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse were playing in the garden (kutty park in his language) when suddenly a worm jumped out from Mickey’s mouth and Minnie jumped on seeing the wiggly worm come out of his mouth. So she asked him if he brushes his teeth for which Mickey says, ‘it’s a boring thing to do’. So Minnie takes him to a dentist who examines his teeth and tells him there are lots of worms inside and cleans up everything. So he then gives mickey a red color toothbrush and toothpaste and tells him it is wise to brush his teeth everyday”.

So finally he brushes his teeth.. Well life’s not so easy, cos sometimes the story doesn’t work, so I’ve to think of other creative ways to make him brush his teeth. Once his friend gifted him a Lightning Macqueen car and thanks to it, as it shows its teeth all smiling. So I brush its teeth first and make him brush his own. These are characters he loves being associated with, he’s mad about Mickey and adores Lightning. And then comes drinking milk. Now when he takes the glass of milk from me he immediately asks me for the goofy story that I tell him. That story goes something like this:

“Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy, Daisy and Donald are playing in the park and after sometime Goofy becomes very tired. And Mickey asks him if he had anything to eat or drink before coming for play. So Goofy tells Mickey how he dislikes milk so much. So then Mickey takes him to his house and makes him a special chocolate milk like how I give for PAL. Goofy takes a liking for it and after he drinks it, becomes very strong that he’s able to play lots of games”.

Well, these stories may seem very silly, but not to my 2 year old hero. He loves them and what’s better, there’s no fighting or power struggles for getting him to eat his food or drink his milk. Off late I made up my stories out of a cartoon he watched in YouTube about a Tractor Tom, and he just loves them and wants to hear them again and again. He loves listening to stories at bedtime. I have a collection of few Disney and ladybird books from which I tell him stories and sometimes he’d want to listen to Hindu mythology stories and on a few nights it’s the old traditional fables. And the best thing about this is that he once told us a story by combining three stories together (by randomly jumping from one story to another) and made it into one .
I feel stories are just great ways of connecting with your child. Whether you want to teach him about values or candidly encourage him to do a task, they come in very handy.

SR

15 fun things about a 15 month old

1. A full fledge lil explorer that he is.. wants to get into every nook and corner of the house and investigate everything from objects in the cupboard, door stopper, dust on the floor, anything that catches his eye. Also switching on every single switch in the house. They are unreachable? No problem, he’ll want you to lift him and will endlessly keep switching them on.. Switching off? That’s my job to do.
2. Wants to be outside throughout the day … like even if you are coming back home after a whole evening at the beach, he wouldn’t want to enter the house.
3. Wants to be part of every single activity his mom does.. sweeping the floor – yes, cutting vegetables – yes. well every single job that you are doing
4. Babble all the time … sometimes even try to sing something
5. Loves to say ‘no’ by shaking his head to anything that you ask for
6. Wears his father’s shoes and walks around the house
7. Jumps off the ground without actually lifting his legs off the ground
8. Loves treading his own path when taken for a walk
9. Keeps the phone on his ear and pretends like talking.. but doesn’t stop with just that, keeps his blocks toy on his ear, keeps the pen on his ear. Basically pretends to be talking over phone with any object that is of reach not necessarily only with a phone
10. Reaches out for anything at a certain height … keeps things purposefully and tries to reach for them again and again
11. Loves to write with a pen or a color pencil holding on to the tip end of it
12. It’s now his turn to play peek-a-boo with you … he’d not be really hiding behind something all the times … So suddenly in the middle of something he’ll start actioning as though he’s hiding behind something and then coming out to find you
13. His favorite toy is the last thing he’d like to see before hitting the bed and the first thing he’d like to catch hold of when he wakes up in the morning (going by the Disney madness and all the mickey excitement, I thought it’d be his mickey mouse soft toy, but it’s actually an auto rickshaw or tuk tuk)
14. Helps while folding the clothes by taking the small clothes (read: underwear) and wearing it around his neck or on his head like a hat and gives you a big smile like some big task accomplished
15. Loves to eat from your plate … wants whatever you eat and is not very interested in the food given to him!!

Love,
Swetha

When a child is born a mother is born

A year has passed since he came into my life. 14 months and 2 days to be more precise. Where did all these days go so fast? Just seems like the days of initial trouble have passed with a blink of an eyelid. All those milestones and the firsts are still lingering. Cos I reacted to all those like an excited child, jumping up and down. And without realizing, here I’m mother of a one year old whose naughtiness is growing by the day, who amuses me with his new mannerisms and words, who vanish from one place to another in a matter of just a second. And above all who has inspired me to start writing this blog.

Whenever I visit my mom’s place I’d see the bed and wonder how this tiny-winy thing that was lying next to me just shaking his hands and legs all day crying for food and comfort is now running over it making a mess of things and climbing up and down. Like all mothers I feel happy and proud seeing my baby growing and making sure he grows in a healthy and safe environment. Like all mothers I too am dreaming of bringing him up as a good human being. Like all mothers I too make some small/big sacrifices to bring that smile on my baby’s face.

Well I know that there are more challenges to face but more than seeing those as challenges I want to be a guide and a friend to my boy through his growing up years. My husband says I was born to be a mother.. Well I’ve started thinking that way too but more than that, I see it as a gift from god that needs to be cherished and nurtured.

Love
Swetha