Touch and Feel – Baby's Whole World

80% of information about the surrounding environment a newborn receives mainly from touching and feeling something as the eyesight is underdeveloped yet. Hearing is another sense, which helps to get the information about the world, and which is quite developed compared to the sight. Thus, for an infant the favourite music is mom’s and dad’s voices and the favourite feeling is parents’ touch when massaging or  lulling the newborn into the sleep.

Development of senses is closely connected to the intellectual development, therefore, during the first year it is essential to pay major attention to the sensoric as well as to the physical development. With every touch baby is learning about the life. Besides, it provides the feeling of safety, which stimulates self-confidence and makes baby calm and happy.

 

To make our newborn feel safe and comfort, we are trying our best to stimulate the development of senses: massaging, lulling, singing nursery rhymes, speaking and commenting his funny emotions.

Besides, with Maria we prepared a magic bag with pieces of fabric of different texture. Mornings and evenings we put these pieces one by one into Andrew’s small palms for him to have various feelings.

This magic bag can be also used by Maria in the form of the game proposed by M. Montessori: to find another piece of fabric of the same texture when eyes shut.

Professions, occupation, jobs…

Mary 2y. 3m.

.. the Thesaurus shows that the antonyms of these words are Entertainment, Fun and Hobby. For Maria the mentioned antonyms are perfectly correct definitions of the time when we were diving deep into the adults’ world to study some professions and jobs. As many kids, she is keen on learning more of what grown-ups are actually doing.

·         Watching presentations and flashcards;

·         Playing lotto about professions;

·        Trying ourselves what the guys of different professions do: seamstress (were sewing a rabbit), scientist-physicist (made different experiment with liquid solubility in the water - we tried gouache, Fairy washing liquid, oil), pilot (made and painted a pilot cap, were flying all around);

·         Cutting out and gluing different attributes of each occupation.

This is what we’ve been doing with Maria about a year ago. Now, of course, when she can concentrate her attention for longer time, I’d offer her more sophisticated games to gain knowledge further.  Indeed, the topic is endless and it can be studied at any age…

"Seasonal" Musical Mobile

Andrew being almost a month old loves when his sister turns on music for him, which often lulls him into the sweet dreams. When the musical mobile is turned on, Andrew is also interested in what is going on above him and is carefully watching the characters moving.

To make his view more diverse, we decided to make another four characters for Andrew to get him acquainted with some of the attributes of the four seasons we have. For Maria it was also a good exercise when she was gluing felt details together. We did the job in less than 15 min, so Andrew was soon able to enjoy the new stuff moving and sounding above him.

Sand Art

Sand art therapy helps to express children the “inexpressible”. Playing with sand helps to express feelings and aspects of the personal life experiences. There are no borders for expression except the bottle itself (in case of bottle sand art, which we tried with Maria). One can experiment with colours, forms, combinations…

Bottle sand art turned out to be easy, fun and exciting! Maria could not help playing with the sand, despite being late for her gymnastics class. She really enjoyed the process and the result, which can easily become a nice present.

Before filling up the bottles, we prepared some sand additionally as we lacked several colours – yellow, red, brown. The preparation process enthralled Maria as well:

1.       Pour some vodka in the bowl;
2.       Add gouache;
3.       Add semolina to get homogeneous mass, which should become dry and as crumbly as the sand.

Then, you are ready to proceed with filling up the bottles, which, by the way, to a great extent resembles Montessori type exercise.

We had some sand left over, so we decided to make a dolphin sand painting as well.