A lot of writers have commented on the modern phenomenon of overscheduled children. An “overscheduled” child is one who has lots of different enriching activities on. Not only does this child go to a Montessori preschool (or some other preschool), but he or she also goes to swimming lessons, beginner gym classes and more. The options get even wider when the school years kick in, with out-of-school sporting and cultural possibilities galore.

You might ask what on earth has changed since our childhoods. A lot of us (I do!) remember piano lessons and Girl Guides/Boy Scouts and Saturday sport with a mid-week practice. However, very few children back in the 1970s and even the 1980s did everything. You were seldom out every night of the week doing things – if you did piano, sport and Guides/Scouts, that was only three nights a week and even then, the piano lesson only took half an hour. But today, it’s very easy for parents to try to do everything to give their children an enriched experience and allow them to have every single opportunity possible, and to have something on every single day of the week – sometimes two things in one day.

And all these activities, worthwhile as they all are individually, are having a bad effect on children. The main way that it is affecting children is in their sleeping patterns. Now, this might have you scratching your head a bit. Surely, if a child does a whole lot of activities, he or she is going to come home in the evening, eat a bit and then tumble into bed and go straight off to sleep because so much energy has been used during the day with all those activities.

However, while a child might be tired at the end of a busy day with heaps of scheduled activities, he or she might not be getting the quality sleep needed for good health. And it’s not just a case of banging kids into bed earlier. All those activities are very stimulating and get a good buzz of excitement going – something that technically could be called stress but doesn’t seem like stress as your child probably does enjoy gym, music and movement, swimming lessons, art classes, etc.  But this buzz of excitement does make it harder for your child to relax enough to get into “delta sleep” – a very deep sleep state where all the growing and rebuilding of tissues is done. According to some experts, this lack of quality sleep may be a contributing cause of ADHD – it’s as if whizzing around, chopping and changing from this to that becomes an inbuilt habit.

So what’s a parent to do? How do you ensure that your child does get enough sleep and the right sort of sleep? It’s at this point, you’re likely to be feeling horribly guilty every way you turn: you feel guilty if your child isn’t getting a chance to do those fun and enriching activities. But you feel guilty if you are doing those activities because this could be putting a bit too much onto your child. So take a deep breath. You are a good parent and you want the best for your child. You love him or her to bits. And you don’t need to be driven by guilt.

First of all, take a look at your child’s schedule – their time diet. Are there a lot of activities on there alongside going to preschool? Remember, your child isn’t even at school yet, and there’s plenty of time to pick up skills. The artist Gaugin didn’t pick up a paintbrush until he was 40. Put a limit on the number of activities outside preschool that your child does. During the preschool years, one extra thing is enough.  And leave the rest of the days free so your child can have time to just discover who he/she is.

One thing that is fundamental in Montessori education is that children will do things at their own pace and should be allowed to concentrate on an activity for as long as they want to. Heavy-duty scheduling goes right against this. Slow down. Do not worry about whether your child is getting enough stimulation and enrichment and socialisation at home when he/she is not at preschool. If your child has space to play and things to play with, he/she will be fine.

If you do want to choose an activity for your child out of preschool time, choose carefully. Sometimes, you may have to say no to some of the wonderful things that are on offer. The way to choose is to study your child (another Montessori principle) and see what he or she is into. If your child doesn’t seem to stop dancing, then music and movement classes are probably a goer. If your child is always wanting to play a particular sport, then pick that sport. And if your child just seems interested in everything in general, then maybe you don’t need to do anything special – maybe something simple like story time sessions at libraries or something useful like swimming lessons. Or just do stuff.

The other thing to do is to have a proper wind-down schedule for bedtime. This isn’t just a case of brush teeth, put on pyjamas and jump into bed. It’s a process of slowing down and relaxing before bed. It’s a case of bedtime stories, drinks of warm milk, silly games, songs, possibly a few routine chores done as a family, baths or showers (or just washing faces and hands), chatting and maybe time for prayer or reflection and being grateful for the day that’s been. Put TVs, computers and i-Things to bed earlier, especially as these stop the brain producing sleep-inducing melatonin. Incidentally, this is as beneficial for parents as it is for children.

Share and Enjoy

The post Your Child’s Time Diet appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

Maria Montessori

But what about at home?  You may or may not have some of the equipment at home for your child to play with as a way of supporting what they learn at our early childhood centre.  It’s not necessary to have your own copies of the sensory materials to help your child, and you can probably make do with what you already have, or what you can find easily in your local toy shop.

The games and toys that you can do at home should help your child explore various dimensions (length, width and height – and probably volume should be added here) or attributes (shape and colour). Alternatively, the games should help your child practise their self-care skills.

So what can you do? Here are a few guidelines for games that you can play at home with your preschool child.

• Make your own dressing frames so your child can practise zipping, buttoning and tying. When you are sorting through your clothes or your child’s clothes to find things that are too small or too worn, keep an eye out for things that still have buttons, zips (etc.) that work. The act of sorting out the clothes and testing them to make sure that the zips work and that all the buttons are where they should be is quite fun for you and your child, and also puts these skills into practice. Put these old clothes over a frame of some sort – it can be anything that holds the garment taut. Even a big fat teddy bear will do.
• Building blocks. If you have a good set of wooden blocks, you can play a host of games with your child. Of course, the obvious thing that you and your child will try doing is building things with them – often with the goal of trying to build the tallest tower possible. To do this, you will have to start with the biggest blocks down the bottom and have the little blocks up the top, so you end up with a sort of Eiffel Tower structure. This will help your child explore the concepts of length and width – and height.  Don’t forget to crash the tower down at the end of the building.
• Another building block game can be played to help your child work on their language skills, especially the words relating to space and dimension. For this game, you’ll both need matching sets of blocks, one set each (e.g. both of you have two big red rectangular blocks, six shorter yellow rectangles, etc.). Sit on opposite sides of a screen (a big armchair, for example) so you can’t see what your child is building. Your child has to build a construction or make a pattern with his/her blocks, and while he/she does that, they have to say exactly what they are doing so you can make the same thing. You are not allowed to look at what they’re doing but you have to do exactly as you’re told. Once the building is finished, your child gets to look at what you’ve done. If it’s a mess and not at all like your child’s construction, this is less discouraging for your child, as it’s not their building that went wrong. After you’ve laughed about the mess you made, ask if you can try again… which gets your child practising their language skills a bit more until Silly Old Mum or Dad gets the building right.
• Play Guess Who (the classic board game with the faces). This game is very good for exploring attributes that apply to people (e.g. gender, hair colour, eye colour). If you don’t have a copy of the Guess Who game, you can sort of make your own using any set of play material that has items with varying attributes.  Again, wooden blocks are good for this sort of thing, and you can ask questions like “Is your block red?” or “Is your block a triangle?” or “Is your block bigger than my hand?”
• Make a picture bingo set – easy to do with a home computer and a printer. In a word processing programme, create a table with 4 rows and four columns. Put a clip art picture in each cell. Shapes are good – you can vary the shape itself and the fill colour to get the variety needed. Make several sheets, with a different table on each. When you print them out, print out two copies of each sheet/table. Stick the sheets on cardboard. One set of duplicates will be cut up to make the cards. If you don’t have or don’t want to use the printer, then you can draw a set up to use. As well as shapes, you can use smileys showing different emotions, different animals, items of clothing that vary in colour…  Use your imagination to think of other matching games. Or use letters of the alphabet to help your child’s pre-reading skills.
• Play simple games like Snap, Old Maid or Fish with an ordinary set of playing cards (see our earlier post on this topic). Here, you have shapes and numbers to match up.
• Play Tidy The House. You might not think of this as a game, but keeping tidy and ordered is an important concept at a Montessori early learning centre, and it works well at home. Make sure that your child has tools for tidying the house that fit them – small brooms and the like. Dusters, of course, are always the right size, but let your child have his/her own duster for wiping and tidying. Sing while you do the chores around the house – if you find cleaning chores a bit of a drag, it’s best to cover this up so your child doesn’t pick up this attitude from you.

Share and Enjoy

The post Games To Support Montessori Learning appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

And if you’re like most parents, life was probably a bit too hectic through the toddler years to give much thought to room design and layout in your child’s bedroom, and the room probably just evolved around your child. However, as the weather changes and we go into a new season that’s likely to bring a bit of rain along, this can be a good time of year to re-evaluate how you organise your home, and one room – a child’s bedroom – is a good project that isn’t too overwhelming.

Of course, if you have moved house recently or are just about to, you probably have the opportunity to think about where your child is at now and what he or she needs. Here is Montesori resource on setting up a childs bedroom.

So let’s dive on in and get started…

• The bed is the most important part of the bedroom for obvious reasons. By now, your child has probably graduated to a “big bed” and is well and truly out of the cot. It’s so much easier to get out of bed and go to the loo in the middle of the night if you don’t have to climb over high sides. A lot of preschool children still wet the bed at night – they say 1 in 500 children don’t outgrow it until their teens – so position the bed so you can get to both sides reasonably easily to tuck sheets and blankets in. Even with overnight nappies, you will still be changing sheets more frequently than otherwise, so you may as well make this chore easier.
• Clothes storage. One of the self-care things we encourage through Montessori education is getting dressed. This means that you need to provide some easy-access storage for your child so he or she can choose clothes quickly and easily in the mornings without scrambling around with high rails in wardrobes or high shelves. You don’t need to buy a special children’s storage unit for this. A traditional “duchess” dresser with a mirror up the top and lots of drawers will last a lifetime. While children are small, the clothes they need can fit easily into the drawers in one of these dressers, with little need for any other storage space. Put good clothes that you don’t want worn daily on hangers in the wardrobe.
• Toy storage. Don’t go for the traditional toybox. These get so muddled and disorganised, and they can be a bit of a hazard with that lid coming down on small fingers. Go for something involving pigeonholes or cubbyholes with lots of smallish compartments that can fit one set of toys in each compartment. Stacking boxes also work. Use pictures and/or words to label the compartments so children know what goes where. Teddies can sit on the top of the dresser or go on the end of the bed, as these tend to be a bit big to all go into a cubbyhole. Or try slinging a hammock in one corner for the teddies to go to sleep in. Dolls go in the dolls’ house, of course.
• A place to sit. Where else are you going to sit for the bedtime story?  Try a comfy chair or maybe a blanket box that stores things that aren’t in everyday use. 
• A lamp.  Having the lighting low in the evening helps soothe children and get them ready for sleep. Place the lamp by the chair to get good lighting for bedtime stories. 
• Curtains. A must, as rooms need to be dimly lit at night for good sleep. Opening the curtains in the morning and closing them at night make a sort of ritual pattern to mark the start and end of the day.

Nice but not necessary:

Several things are nice to have in a child’s bedroom but aren’t absolute musts.  Clutter tends to be a bit stressful and has a tendency to become disordered, so maybe having all of them isn’t the best idea!

• A night light for children who are unsettled by the dark.
• Potplants of the more robust type to bring nature indoors and help enhance the air quality. A spider plant in a hanging basket is a good choice, as these are out of reach. Avoid anything poisonous or prickly, unless it’s well and truly out of reach.
• Mosquito nets and canopies above the bed.
• Pictures on the walls.
• Extra throw cushions for sitting up in bed and pillow fighting.
• Desk or table with a chair of the right height for doing painting and projects on.
• A CD and radio for playing soothing music at night and bouncy dance music through the day.
• A clock – and help children learn a few basics about reading it so they know when they should (and shouldn’t) get out of bed.

Best avoided

Some things should be completely avoided in children’s rooms. The reasons for excluding certain items vary, ranging from thing that are just downright dangerous to those that are likely to be too hard on your budget in the long run.

• TVs and computers. You need to have some control over what children are watching, when they watch and how much. Keeping the TV and other screens out of the bedroom is a good way of ensuring that you stay in control. TVs in bedrooms are a bad idea for everyone when it comes to getting a good night’s sleep, not just for children.
• Multiboards or whatever you call those things with four or more electric sockets that feed into a single wall socket. They’re hard to keep out of child reach, and all it takes is one enterprising child to have a go at plugging in a CD player solo for disaster to happen.
• Long-term décor in a certain theme. Here, we’re talking about anything that’s likely to last for more than five years: duvet covers, wallpaper, things printed or painted on durable furniture. While your child might think that Thomas the Tank engine is the coolest thing on the planet and wants everything in their bedroom to be Thomas-related now, by the time he or she is a teenager, or even by the time they’ve been in school a few years, this craze will have passed. Remember Adrian Mole trying to paint over the Noddy wallpaper?
• Flimsy furniture that can’t stand being climbed on, knocked over, pushed about and generally treated roughly. If the budget’s tight, go for second-hand stuff that’s durable rather than cheap and nasty new stuff.

Share and Enjoy

The post Setting Up A Childs Bedroom appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

Phonics is a method of learning to read that looks at the sounds the letters make and starts there, learning the sounds first and working up from there. This is completely different from the “whole language” approach that was popular in schools and early childhood centres back in the 1980s. The “whole language” method encouraged children to learn words as whole units rather than sounding out the individual letters and putting them together.

Phonics isn’t new.  In fact, it’s probably one of the older ways of learning how to read. If you’ve read “Great Expectation” by Charles Dickens, you might remember the scene where Pip is trying to teach his foster father, Joe, to read, and Joe has managed to sound out J-O… Joe. The idea of phonics is probably as old as the alphabet – in fact, it’s the principle behind the alphabet itself (with some exceptions of course, with Chinese being the most notable).

The phonics method of learning language fits in very well with the traditional tools of learning used in a Montessori classroom. The moveable alphabet is just made for phonics – the letters are presented as individual sounds and these letters are then built up into longer words.

Learning using phonics goes through several defined steps, getting gradually more and more complicated. The very first words learned using phonics are usually short, single-syllable words using short vowels. (Not sure what a short vowel is? They are the vowel sounds heard in the sentence “fAt mEn sIt On hUmps.”)  At this stage – which is acutally the second stage of phonics; the first is associating letters with sounds – children learn how to sound out words like “cat”, “dog” “Dad” “cup” and so forth. And they can work out how to make the words, too, using tools like the moveable alphabet.

Occasionally, you find early reading books that use the principles of phonics to help children learn to read. The stories are, of necessity, rather simple, as the vocabulary is limited to words that fit the criteria of one syllable, short vowels and single consonant sounds.  The Victorian school system (meaning the school system back in the Victorian era, not the system in the state of Victoria) was good at producing early readers of this type, with attempts at stories that usually involved an ox (“I am up on an ox. It is my ox. Go on, ox. My ox is to go in.”), illustrated with woodcuts of kids learning to ride cattlebeasts. The famous “A cat sat on the mat” was part of this system.

A lot of people sneered at these graded readers as being boring. Possibly they were, but from a child’s point of view, they were probably more fun than endlessly looking at pictures accompanied by labels in red letters.  And it’s not easy to write a story using the criteria of early-stage phonics. If you are feeling a bit creative, have a go at writing one yourself (makes a good word game).

The next stage in phonics introduces some simple consonant blends, such as –ck at the end of a word or th- at the start of a word.  This progresses to concepts such as long vowels, more complicated consonant blends (cr-, bl- and so forth) and then onto “magic e” and “r-controlled” vowels (e.g. “car” , “perk” and so forth), then diphthongs and digraphs (two vowels together, as in “sound”, “ear”, “soup” and so on) and then onto all the curly exceptions that English has.

When do you move from one stage to the next? This differs from child to child, and you can help your child move from one stage to the next when you see that he/she has mastered the current stage.

One of the main objections to phonics is that English doesn’t always play by the rules of phonics.  We’ve all be caught out by words that aren’t pronounced the way they look, and we all know about the way that one letter can have multiple sounds (look at the y in yet, my and rugby), and that one sound can have multiple spellings (think of the long e sound in been, mean, scene, yield, ceiling rugby). However, 75% of English words do play by the rules.

One of the problems for children learning to read is that a lot of the words they want to learn how to make and to read are exceptions.  Think of “was” and “the”, for example. Problems also crop up if a child’s name doesn’t play by the rules of phonics.  It’s important to learn how to read your name early on. This is all very well if your name is Jill, Max, Sam, Anna, Jack or Emma. But if your name is Phillip, Kathryn, Geoffrey, Phoebe, Warren or Stephanie, your name doesn’t fit the phonics rules.

So a little bit of look-and-say word learning of the whole language type is needed just to make it easier for a beginner reader to be able to use reading and writing.

How can you help your child learn via phonics? The following tips might help:

• When you read with your child and you come across a word that they should be able to sound out, stop reading and ask him/her to work it out.
• Make a moveable alphabet for use at home.  This doesn’t have to be as fancy as the sandpaper letters seen in a Montessori classroom – magnetic letters on the fridge or even letters cut out of the newspaper and stuck on cardboard are great.
• When you’re out and about, spot letters printed on signs and see if you can find words that your child can read in your environment.
• Play I Spy, which reinforces the link between sounds and letters. If you spy something beginning with D, all the names of the things suggested will start with that D sound – dog, Dad, doughnut, daffodil…

Share and Enjoy

The post Phonics: What Is It And How Does It Work? appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

Actually, as a quick aside, a three-year-old can sort of join in a game of 500.  If you have only three competent players and are playing cutthroat with a dummy hand, a three-year-old can have the job of turning the top card of the dummy hand over. Don’t expect him or her to last for the whole game, but for the few rounds that they are there, the “cute factor” is certainly worth including them, especially when they manage to win a trick or two.

But back to card games for the very young. You may wonder what the benefits of introducing card games to the very young are. Obviously, your child will learn some good social skills – and that’s something that we consider very important as part of Montessori education.  Card games are good icebreakers and knowing a few of the most popular and easy ones may one day stand your child in good stead when he or she has flow the nest (a long way off at this stage, I know) and is staying in a backpackers’ hostel somewhere in the UK. But other important social skills are learnt along the way, such as taking turns and the ability to win (and lose) graciously.

Card games also introduce some good mathematical and scientific skills. Classification – identifying whether a card is a heart, diamond, spade or club – is a basic scientific skill and is one of the things that we do in a Montessori classroom. The same applies to identifying court cards.  You’ve also got maths skills – recognising numbers, as well as ranking and ordering.

When you begin playing card games with your preschool child, remember to insist on proper card-playing etiquette right from the start. This means that the dealer dishes out the cards clockwise, starting from his or her left, you don’t pick up your hand until all the cards are dealt, and the dealer’s left is the first person to play. It’s part of the Montessori idea of graciousness.

On the practical side, holding a hand of cards in a traditional fan is very difficult for small hands. It’s best to let him or her lay the cards in the hand down face up behind a screen such as a large book at first. Later on, encourage the use of the fan, starting with a small number of cards.

So what card games can preschool children play?

• Snap. The most basic card game of them all. The very simplest version involves calling “snap” on matching suits; the more “advanced” version requires matching numbers. This game can be played as soon as a child is able to distinguish the suits, while the more advanced one can come with the ability to recognise numbers.
• Fish. Another simple matching game, where you collect sets of four (e.g. four jacks, four queens, four aces, etc.). This can be played when your child is able to recognise numbers (and the letters J, Q, K and A) and knows that a full set of four has a heart, a diamond, a spade and a club.
• Spoons. A more lively game where the aim is to collect a set of four.  Here, the parent takes out enough cards so that there is one set of four per person (this one is best played with more than two players). Set out a collection of spoons in the middle, with one less spoon than there are players (e.g. three spoons for four players). Shuffle and deal. On each move, everybody passes a card to the person on their left, getting rid of a card they don’t want in an attempt to collect a set of four. Chanting “pass… and pick up” helps everybody synchronise the passing and the picking up of the new card. When someone gets a set of four, they grab a spoon, which is the signal for everyone to grab a spoon, with one person being left out.  If being left out is too upsetting or if there is a risk of older siblings hurting small fingers, play Teddies, where there is one teddy per person (easier to grab), with one teddy being the “King Teddy” and if you grab it, you’re the winner.
• Donkey. Again, this requires children to be able to recognise letters and numbers.  Play with a pack that includes one joker, or take one card out (traditionally the ace of clubs or the queen of clubs).  Pass a card you don’t want to the person on your left on each move, as for Spoons, but collect pairs rather than fours. Try not to get stuck with the odd card out.
• Beggar My Neighbour. This one also goes by the rather naughty name of Strip Jack Naked.  It’s a two-player game so divide the pack in half. Don’t pick up your hand. Everyone turns over one card onto a pile in the middle. If someone turns over a court card, the person on their left has to pay a set number of cards onto their pile. The set number is one card for a jack, two for a queen, three for a king and four for an ace. For example, if Harry turns a queen, Mary (to his left) puts two cards onto the pile from her hand. Then the person who played the court card (Harry in this case) picks up the whole pile from the middle, even if Mary played another court card. The winner is the one who ends up with all the cards. This requires children who know how to count as well as how to recognise numbers.
• I Declare War. Like Beggar My Neighbour, the aim is to win all the cards. Any number of players, and divide the pack evenly among them. Don’t pick up the cards.  On each move, everyone turns over one card. The person with the highest card wins the trick and adds the cards won in the trick to his/her hand. If two (or more) players play cards of equal value, then both turn over three cards face down while chanting “I De-Clare War!” and on the word “War”, they turn over a fourth card face up, with the winner taking the facedown cards and all the cards for the trick.  This requires children who understand numerical order and ranking. You can play this game with trump suits as a way of introducing the concept, with everyone playing a dummy hand.

There are many other card games that are good for young children to play, but these should be good to get you started.

Share and Enjoy

The post Card Games For The Very Young appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

This is a good place to point out that teasing and name-calling is one of the things we are really against here at Friday’s Child Montessori. This sort of thing goes right against the Montessori principle of courtesy and being a good citizen, and the teachers are alert for any sort of bullying going on.  If you think that your child is having a problem in this area – either as the bully or as the victim – please let us know.

But back to weight issues.  One of the reasons that we’re seeing this increase in childhood obesity throughout the Western world is because children are less active than they used to be. The other reason is the prevalence of fast food and processed food, but that’s another story and we won’t cover that in this article.

A lot of things are to blame for the reduction in activity that seems to be going on.  Sometimes, it’s a matter of space. Gardens are getting smaller while houses are getting bigger (and some houses have hardly any garden area at all in main urban areas).  With more parents working longer hours just to keep up, there is less time available to tidy up the mess that active children always make – and this will happen, in spite of the Montessori principle of putting away your play equipment once you’ve finished with it.  Fear also plays a role. In the past – possibly when today’s parents were children – it wasn’t a big deal for even young children to go down to the park with older siblings. But today, when people are more aware of molestation and child abuse, parents are much less likely to allow this, quite naturally.

So what can you do to help your children become active enough to stay healthy?  The good news is that children need very little encouragement to be active.  Sometimes, you might be asking how to stop them being so active and whizzing all round the place and getting underfoot.  All children really need is opportunity.  However, the secret is to provide opportunities for activity that aren’t likely to cause havoc and destruction – and aren’t just before bedtime or when you want a bit of peace and quiet.

The other thing to bear in mind is that you will need to get involved in some of these activities.  This will probably do you some good and help your fitness level as well!

Try the following ways of encouraging your child to enjoy active play and activity in general:

• Outdoor play equipment.  If you have a small amount of space, provide some form of outdoor play equipment.  While you don’t want to take stupid risks (e.g. putting a set of monkey bars over concrete), you will need to let children face a few risks and even suffer a few bumps and bruises, so don’t feel that you have to install a soft surface beneath play equipment of the sort you’ll see in an early childhood centre. Just grass is soft enough!  Outdoor play equipment doesn’t have to be expensive, either.  A chalk hopscotch figure that’s the right size for your child and a couple of old tyres to climb plus a ball or two is enough.

• Let children go outside when it’s raining.  Sure, you don’t want your precious child to freeze or catch hypothermia, but the chances of that happening here on the Gold Coast are pretty slim.  So let children run around outside a bit on rainy days, even if they get muddy.  Just make sure that they change their clothes on the doorstep. This will stop them being over-active indoors and running the risk of breaking something.

• Dance.  Arrange your living room and/or your child’s bedroom so he or she can have the fun of moving to music.

• Encourage outdoor or active hobbies rather than (or as well as) passive indoor ones.  During the weekend, don’t just curl up in front of the TV, DVD player or computer.  Head to the beach or the local swimming pool.  Go for a bike ride (even if this means that your child has to ride behind you on a child-safe bike seat – it will help build positive associations with exercise as well as being quality time).  Go for a walk.  Weekend activity doesn’t have to involve organised sports clubs – doing it free range is just as good and just as fun.

• Romp and roughhouse with small children.  This seems to be something that dads tend to be very good at – play wrestling and general clowning around.  Again, you’ll need to have a clear space in the living room for this to take place, and you’ll need to set boundaries (e.g. no punching or kicking, adults stay on their knees, no using hard objects as a weapon).  Pillow fights fall into this category, or you can have battles with pool noodles or foam rubber swords.  It’s a good way for adults to release a bit of stress and goof off, as well as giving the children quality time and exercise.  In the past, some experts, particularly Dr Spock, discouraged this sort of play between adults and children, but today, it’s more widely held that your instincts is right and this sort of play is healthy. It helps children learn how to be strong and aggressive without being violent (and you can teach them a few good self-defence moves if you feel like it).

• Build walking and being more active into your routines.  You might find it hard to break the habit of taking the lift rather than the stairs or parking as close to the shops as you can. But if you make yourself do it, especially when you’re with your children, this sort of thing will become normal for your children and they’ll get good habits that will (hopefully) last a lifetime.

Share and Enjoy

The post Encouraging Children To Be Active appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

There are many educational bonuses that come from having a fancy dress box. Firstly, the children playing with the items in there get to practise some of their self-care skills (something we’re right into with Montessori education) as they put the items on: doing up buttons, getting clothes round the right way and all the rest of it. Secondly, playing with dress-up clothes encourages fantasy play, which is excellent for stimulating creative thinking and the imagination. Furthermore, if the fantasy play that your child enjoys involves dressing up as a member of a certain job, this also helps them think about the community and the role that different people play in it. If your child shows an interest in, say, fire fighters or police officers, this can offer a good “teachable moment” for you to talk about law and order, or fire safety.

Experts say that fantasy play is most beneficial if children write their own “scripts” for the stories they act out in their play rather than following a script dictated by a book, movie or a TV show. Children will re-enact what they’ve heard or seen, of course.  They’ve been doing this long before TV was invented, so it would be wrong to blame this medium for scripted fantasy play. But your children are more likely to go for unscripted play (i.e. writing their own scripts) if the dress up items are more generic rather than associated with a certain character.

This doesn’t mean that you should ban all Spiderman and Snow White costumes as a way of encouraging unscripted play. They have their place, as long as they don’t dominate. And a child who has a mental diet of a range of things (books, good TV shows and movies) will take their characters into new situations. But it would be wise to keep the licensed costumes to a minimum. It tends to be cheaper, too!

The American feminist writer and mother Peggy Orenstein wrote a very enlightening and sometimes funny book entitled “Cinderalla Ate My Daughter” where she highlights the way the emphasis on princesses, especially of the Disney sort, programmes little girls into a lifestyle of obsessing about looks and consumerism.  The book’s certainly worth a read (and it’s not abrasive or lecture-like but makes quite a good read as the author describes some of her own struggles with the issues as she raises a preschool girl). Anyway, this book highlights the fact that when it comes to costumes and dressing-up options for girls in particular, the options seem to be rather limited to fairies, princesses and fairy princesses, with the odd mermaid (probably a princess as well).

It would probably be helpful for your child, whether male or female, to provide dress-up items that aren’t gender-limiting.  This isn’t to say that you should ban princess gear – everybody likes a bit of sparkly bling and a tiara or so now and again. But you should have other options available. A good compromise is to go to the local Sally Army shop or similar and hunt out the cheap bling and old party dresses and use those instead of the over-priced licensed stuff. Then you can invent your own sort of princess – maybe with the help of some traditional fairy tales and a bit of history.  And don’t forget that princes like bling, too.

Sorry about the focus on girls here for a moment, but if you are short of ideas as to what your daughter could wear to a fancy dress party that’s different, you might need some suggestions. Sure, you could be really radical and have your daughter go as a miner, but this tends to get you branded as a weird parent. So here are a few ideas (and there might be a few ideas here that boys could be interested in, too):

• Black cat: wear a black T-shirt and leggings and pin a tail made from rolled up black fabric or even black paper to the back.  Add pointy ears to a headband and finish with a mask or whiskers put on with eyeliner.  You could try other colours (ginger, white or tabby) but black is easiest and stays clean.
• Warrior princess: Still a princess but not one who sits around waiting for her prince to rescue her.  Add bling to a bit of play armour – a crown and body armour; a helmet and a sparkly cloak.  Blondes and redheads can have their hair braided Viking-style topped with the obligatory horned helmet.
• Maid Marian (and her Disney cousin Merida from Brave). A coat hanger and a piece of elastic makes a simple toy bow that can shoot straws for safe arrows.  Green from head to foot for Maid Marian and grey for Merida.
• Pirate: Another excuse for combining swords with bling and frills.  Big hoop earrings and a polka-dot bandana.
• Punk rocker:  Denim jeans, temporary hair colour and a few safety pins.
• Victorian lady (hey, she could be a suffragette!): long skirt in a dark colour with a button-up blouse and a brooch, hair in a bun and a hat with feathers or flowers.
• Artist: big floppy shirt, black leggings and either a beret or paintbrushes used as hair accessories.
• Eccentric teacher (a la Magic Schoolbus) or mad scientist: Big glasses, frizzed up hair and either very loud clothing or a white labcoat (a big white shirt).

The idea dressing-up box should contain a combination of shop-bought costumes, props both home-made and bought, masks, and old clothes and accessories. Even cardboard boxes can be recycled into masks, while old sheets and tablecloths make instant capes.

If storage is an issue and you can’t find a box big enough to store your collection of dressing up clothes, then large plastic bags (the sort used for the rubbish collection) work quite well and can be squashed into a wardrobe and/or stacked if needed.

Share and Enjoy

The post Fancy Dress Fun appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

The very first books to read to small children – and you can start reading to children as soon as they’re able to sit up on your lap – are the “look and point” type, where there are a few words and some big pictures on the page.  This phase passes soon enough – and you might want to move on to the next phase if you have more than one child who also wants to be read to.

A good book for pre-schoolers needs to meet several criteria.  However, these criteria aren’t simple vocabulary and bold pictures.  Sure, these can help, but a good book for pre-schoolers can break these rules.  A good book is one that parents enjoy reading to children.  You are more likely to read a story to your children again and again (and again) if it’s something you can appreciate in some way.  Over-simple stories with not-so-hot drawings are going to bore the parent doing the reading, and your feelings about the book will come out, in spite of your best efforts to disguise this.  You would do better to read a recipe book to your pre-schooler. Something with a little bit of plot tension and a little bit of character is much more interesting, and good illustrations also go a long way.

Length is the second consideration.  It’s best to steer clear of proper “chapter books” when your children are pre-schoolers and to go for stories that stand alone in one sitting.  Stories which contain a stand-alone story for each chapter work well, though (Why are most of the stories of this type older books?  Why is nobody writing these today?).  However, if your pre-schooler is about four or five, and you have older children, you might be able to start some chapter-book classics like Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in The Willows, The Hobbit and so forth.

Here’s one Top 20 list of books to read to pre-schoolers.  If we’ve left off a family favourite here, we apologize – you can leave a comment to let us and everyone else know what your picks would have been.  I would have liked to have thrown some fairy tale classics in here as well, but there are so many good ones out there these days that it was hard to single particular versions out.

1. Winnie-The-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne.  It’s hard to think of a children’s book that has so much appeal to adults as well with their vivid characters, comedy and rich vocab. These stories have survived Disneyfication, have been translated into Latin, and have inspired adult books on Taosim, literary criticism, management principles, philosophy, New Age neopaganism, psychology and self-help (OK, some of these books are tongue-in-cheek!).
2. Peter Rabbit series by Beatrix Potter.  Exquisite watercolour illustrations, a crisp writing style that doesn’t shy away from sophisticated vocabulary, strong though somewhat old-fashioned moral values in the plots and bound in sizes that are perfect for small hands, these have stood the test of time.
3. Alfie and Annie Rose series by Shirley Hughes. Rich illustrations and good observation of domestic life and the minor dramas of childhood (getting locked indoors, getting new shoes).  Set in urban UK but resonates with children everywhere.
4. My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards. Episode stories that really do well at looking a life through a pre-schooler’s eyes and understanding how hard good behaviour is at times – and a good sense of humour.  Good discussion starters and a way to talk about appropriate behaviour.
5. Hairy Maclary/Slinky Malinki series by Lynley Dodd.  Bouncing rhymes, crazy names and fun illustrations combine to make these popular favourites.  Great stories for adding sound effects.
6. Kipper series and other titles by Mick Inkpen.  Have sticky tape on hand, as these books often feature lift-the-flap illustrations.  One of the most poignant of Mick Inkpen’s books is “Nothing”, about a left-behind toy who has forgotten who and what he is.  The illustrations are simple but with lots of hidden surprises.
7. Milly-Molly-Mandy series by Joyce Lankester Brisley.  Cheerful and positive tales which give a glimpse into life in the past.  Boys can end up liking these as well.
8. A Country Far Away by Nigel Gray.  One story with two sets of illustrations, one which relates the story to a middle-class Western child and the other to a rural African child.  A book about multiculturalism that doesn’t preach or patronise, but shows how children are all the same in spite of cultural differences.
9. My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie.  Every household needs a collection of nursery rhymes.  Iona Opie (and her husband) has specialised in collecting children’s rhymes and has put together the most popular (and some less well known ones) in one big, fat volume.
10. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  Science and maths introduced with those lovely pictures with the holes punched in them.
11. Green Eggs and Ham and other titles by Dr Seuss.  Great for children learning to read as well as good for reading aloud.
12. Where The Wild Things are by Maurice Sendak.  To a child, this is a story with plenty of anarchy, magic and mystery; to an adult, it’s something to psychoanalyse about how it explores and sublimates anger.
13. We’re Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen.  Sound effects and rhyme make this book about adventure and determination memorable and fun.  The final wordless picture gives the ending a twist – was the bear just lonely and wanting to join the fun rather than scary?
14. What Do People Do All Day? and other titles by Richard Scarry.  Explanations of the nuts and bolts of society and the world around us and a great way to answer the questions children have about the world around them.  Lots of things to discover and appreciate in the busy, busy pictures.
15. The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper.  Optimism and positive thinking – who needs self-help books when you have the Little Engine That Could?
16. Thomas the Tank Engine by Rev. W. Audrey.  Lots of stories with vivid characters and exciting plots as the small Thomas attempts to be a Really Useful Engine in spite of not being a big powerful engine like Gordon.
17. Mog the Forgetful Cat series by Judith Kerr.  A cat’s-eye view of family life and domestic dramas that are sometimes exaggerated but are sometimes down to earth (e.g. the cat pooping in the house).  The last book in the series explores death in a non-scary and gentle way.
18. Each Peach Pear Plum and other titles by Allan and Jan Ahlberg.  The Pocket Postman and Each Peach Pear Plum contain references to fairy tale and rhyme that adults appreciate (the letter from Red Riding Hood’s Grandma’s lawyer to the Big Bad Wolf is definitely aimed at grown ups).  “Babies” is probably the best look-and-point book that allows plenty of scope for parents to add their own comments.
19. Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans.  A story in rhyme that has survived translation.
20. Read With Me Bible illustrated by Dennis Jones.  Children need at least a nodding acquaintance with Bible stories so things like Christmas and Easter and references to a Good Samaritan make sense, so we’ve included this one.  Of course, if you follow another faith, you probably know some good versions of the important stories
    presented to children (please let us know these).  This one is one of the best children’s Bible storybooks, as the illustrations and avoid being twee and patronising.

Share and Enjoy

The post The Top 20 Children’s Books appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by watzbase.

Mother Tongue: Language Learning Stages

More than one parent has noticed that you spend the first few years of a child’s life waiting until they can walk and talk, and you then spend the next 15 or so years getting them to sit down and shut up (apart from a brief period during the early teen years in boys when they speak in grunts). That’s a bit cynical, but the fact remains that parents look forward to their children’s first words.

Learning a first language goes in a set pattern of stages, some of which you can see even in children who are deaf.  Learning your first language is completely different from learning a second language when you’re older. If you’re a human being, you are pre-programmed to learn language and you will pick it up without explicit lessons, without textbooks and with next to no help at all. It’s well known that the best time to learn a language is when you’re under the age of 12, as your brain is hard-wired for picking up language and learning grammar. After that age, the language circuits are fixed and picking up languages is a lot harder, as you’ve probably found out if you’ve travelled internationally.

This article is mostly about learning a single language as a first language. However, if your family has two languages – say, the mother is Japanese and the father is Australian – then the process is the same but the child will pick up two languages. If you have a bilingual household, it’s a good idea to talk to your children in both languages and let them pick up both. It won’t be detrimental to their English, as many parents fear, and you’re probably likely to speak to your children in your first language (your heart language) anyway. So keep it up. Your children will soon learn that Mum’s language is for use with Mum while Dad’s language is for Dad and for out and about.

Stage 1 in learning a language is the pre-language stage – or the crying stage. This isn’t really considered language, as the sounds a newborn makes are just responses to the world outside and inside them, especially the world inside the stomach and inside the nappy. However, during this stage, babies are aware of the sounds around them and can hear the differences between language sounds (phonemes). Talk to your baby lots. Instinctively, you will probably speak in “motherese”, where you talk in a funny high-pitched voice and baby talk. Don’t train yourself out of this – babies hear these high frequencies better than lower voices.

Stage 2 is the babbling stage, where your little baby sits and “talks to the angels” in a string of sounds. They say that during this stage, babies are sorting out the sounds that belong in the mother tongue from those that don’t – though how on earth the experts know this is open for debate. They are also learning the tones or notes of conversation. You can help them during this stage by having conversations with them, where you ask questions and say things, and treat their babbles in response as if it was a sensible reply.  If you don’t know what to say, read out an article from a magazine and ask their opinion about it.

Stage 3 is the one-word stage, and it’s the one that parents love.  The first word is so special.  The words that children are most likely to say first have one or two syllables, with the syllables ending in a vowel sound.  Children get a lot of mileage out of their single words. Obviously, “no” is a useful word that can mean “I don’t want to,” “I don’t like that,” “I’m not happy” and “I’ve had enough of this” as well as general displeasure and reluctance. It’s part of becoming a separate individual: you now have the ability to express an opinion that’s different from Mum’s.  (Note: if your child doesn’t seem to have got to the one-word stage by the age of 2½, then you might want to have a chat to the doctor, as this might be an early warning sign of hearing problems, a speech impediment or autism, all of which can be overcome.)

Stage 4 is the two-word stage where children begin to string words together.  During this stage, some phrases are treated as “words”. For example, they might treat “all gone”, “bye bye” and “beep beep” as single words. During this stage, personal pronouns (us, you, him, her, they, etc.) don’t get used, although some children get the hang of “me”.

Stage 5 is the simple sentence stage, where children string more words together, although they leave out a lot of the grammatical bits like prepositions (to, from, for, at) and things that attach onto verbs (-ing, -ed and so forth). They stick to the main words.

Stage 6 is the refining stage when sentences get more complicated. This can be a tricky stage for parents, as the things that children say are almost right but not quite right. This is because children have managed to figure out the basic grammatical rules but haven’t worked out the irregularities (and English is one of the most irregular languages known!).  Children say things like “The zoo mens holded the mouses.” This far, they’ve figured out that you add S to make a plural and that you add –ed to make the past tense. Don’t try to correct them.  It won’t work until their subconscious has learned the rules, which will happen at their own pace.  Most parents instinctively avoid correcting children’s grammar at this stage but focus on the truth of the statement. To quote a linguistics textbook it is “mildly paradoxical… that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful.”

How can parents help children through the process?  While you can’t speed the process of acquiring a language up, the best thing that you can do is to keep talking to your children. Live language is what counts (TV, DVDs and CDs won’t help, so ignore any marketer that tells you that if you pop your child down in front of the box it will help their language).  Read to them lots.  Talk about anything and everything.  Sing to them and with them.  As long as it’s live language, they’ll learn it.

Share and Enjoy

The post Mother Tongue: Language Learning Stages appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by Laurena Rakauskas.

Useful Jobs For Small Hands

One of the goals of Montessori education is to help children become self-sufficient (meaning that they are able to look after themselves – being able to keep themselves in fruit and veggies from the back garden would be a plus but that’s not what we mean by self-sufficient here). We also want children to become responsible citizens who make a contribution, and we want them to look at themselves as capable and successful.

Doing jobs at home is one way that you can support this Montessori goal at home.  This helps children learn to do basic household tasks, and it gives them some responsibility in the household.  Of course, you need to show them how to do it properly, and you need to start off with simple tasks that can be done. Also bear in mind that they are going to do the job more slowly than you would (you’ve had years of practice, after all) and they aren’t going to do it perfectly at first.  There’s a very fine balance between encouraging children to do the job well, having standards too high and having standards too low.  Set the standards too high and your child may get discouraged if they never seem to get it right. However, if you set them too low, your child may get into sloppy habits of doing the bare minimum and be happy with doing the job almost right (e.g. rubbish beside the bin rather than in it, clothes on the chest of drawers rather than in the drawers… some people still seem to have this habit as adults!).

This article was going to be called “Mother’s Little Helpers” but these days, we see household jobs being Father’s responsibility just as often as it is Mother’s.  And even if the jobs around the house are divided between the parents into mum doing the indoor work and dad doing the outdoor stuff, young children are able to help out with both sorts of jobs.

So what can small children do?  Obviously, you’re not going to set your three-year old the task of cooking dinner or mowing the lawn.  That’s bound to end in disaster.  There are heaps of simpler jobs or components of larger jobs that can be done by smaller people.

• Sorting laundry.  While folding the sheets will be a bit too much for smaller arms, children can help sort the laundry into piles and make sure that socks go together.  This is quite a good matching and sorting exercise of the sort that they will do at Friday’s Child Montessori.
• Putting away suitable dishes.  Whether you use a dishwasher or do the dishes by hand, small children are able to put some of the clean ones away – and dry them, too, if you’re doing them by hand.  Sharp knives, glassware, china and anything breakable should be put away by adults or older siblings who are less likely to smash things and cut themselves, as should anything that gets put away somewhere that your pre-schooler can’t reach.  Saucepans, spoons, stirrers, plastic items, forks and butter knives are all fine to be put away by smaller hands.
• Watering the garden by hand.  Sprinklers tend to be frowned on if there’s a water shortage and it uses less water to use the hose.  This is a great job for small people, who have fun playing with the hose and getting water everywhere.  Explain why the plants need water help your child observe the day-to-day changes in the garden while he/she is watering: where has the pumpkin vine got to today?  How tall is the sunflower?  Are the tomatoes ripe yet?  Expect your child to get completely soaked and possibly to nibble a few things out of the garden.
• Pulling out weeds.  It’s best if you teach your child to identify one particular weed species and encourage them to pull that one out to save your seedlings being ripped up by an over-enthusiastic helper.  Chickweed is a good one for children to pull out, as it has shallow roots, doesn’t have thorns, is very invasive and is edible. Convolvulus vines are other candidates, as they are easy to identify and easy to grab.
• Dusting furniture.  If you child can reach it, he or she can dust it.  Damp-dusting is better than using an old-fashioned feather duster, as it picks up the dust more easily and is easier for smaller people to handle.  Pianos are particularly fun to dust, especially the keys –plunk, plunk, plunk!
• Feeding animals.  If you get your pre-schooler to feed animals, it’s best to let them do this with dry biscuit food for cats and dogs, seed for birds, or with fruit and veggie scraps for guinea pigs.  Preschoolers and tinned cat food isn’t a good mix – it goes everywhere and there is a distinct chance that the child will try sampling the cat food.
• Taking items to be recycled to the crate.  If you have a bin for a council-run recycling scheme, children can be put in charge of making sure the junk mail and old newspapers get into this bin, and probably other items as well, such as bottles and cans.
• Vacuuming.  From a child’s perspective, a vacuum cleaner is a lot of fun: it makes a great noise and sucks stuff up like magic.  The head can detach and then it sucks your hair and grabs at you.  You may have to ensure that the pre-tidying that always seems to be needed before vacuuming a house with children is done properly to avoid bits of Lego and the like going up the vacuum cleaner.
• Washing soft toys.  Dry-cleaning fluid is pretty nasty stuff, so if the teddy bears and other soft toys are looking a bit manky, give them a bath in warm water with hand soap.  Do this outside. The toys will need to be rinsed and then spun in the washing machine at slow to medium speed before being dried (either on the washing line or in a machine – or just sitting up in a nice sunny spot).  Do this activity outside, as water and suds go everywhere.

Share and Enjoy

The post Useful Jobs For Small Hands appeared first on Fridays Child Montessori Blog. Written by Laurena Rakauskas.