"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.

Loving vs. Spoiling Child

Many young parents tend to worry how to “demonstrate” their love and care without spoiling children. Perhaps, the border between 'to love' and 'to indulge' might not be too obvious. Still it is there and it would be good to distinguish between these two notions, one of which is vital and useful, while another is destructive for child’s development.

·         Love cannot be indifferent! Loving parents always devote a lot of attention to their offsprings. And if the daughter comes with her newest drawing when dad is watching football match or playing Diablo on his PC, he will never say indifferently: “AAh, ok, nice…”, not even glancing at it.

·         Love is not egoistic! We love our children and this love should be differentiated from self-love.

·         Love is not overprotection. The latter one is done just for parents’ needs: not allowing running into the puddle (thus, no need to run after), dressing the child (to make it happen   faster), feeding the child (to make it happen faster and for the kitchen to remain clean). Love requires responsibility, while spoiling the child – does NOT!

·         Love is ready to overcome difficulties. Indulging the child avoids them. Undoubtedly, it is easier to turn on TV for the children to watch cartoons and adults to relax; than to think of some games, to play theatre, to make a greeting card for grandma together.

To be more specific about love demonstration, there are 5 areas that a child will feel loved according to Gary Chapman’s book, The 5 Love Languages. Every area is important, but usually 1 area is dominating others for every kid.

1. Physical Touch (hugging, holding, patting shoulder, wrestling around, tickling)
2. Words of Affirmation (positive & encouraging words)
3. Quality Time (making an effort to do something special, reading a book, playing a game, doing a craft)
4. Gifts (taking the time to buy a gift or giving them something special)
5. Acts of Service (doing things for them; making their bed, getting them their drink, helping them out with things.

It is a bit hard to understand what Maria is fond of more as her character still undergoes development and transformation stage. However, one can clearly see she loves to hear affirmation words and to spend quality time together with her relatives. For Andrew, as for most of the babies, physical touch is the priority now, but quality time also gains importance.

After Three it’s Too Late...

... - This is the main idea of Masaru Ibuka’s (co-founder of Sony, by the way) book titled “Kindergarten is Too Late!”. He states that child’s potential for learning is the greatest during the first three years of life and suggests the ways and means to take advantage of this fact...

True, one always can do things better, but we tried to make our best for Maria to capture this development period efficiently, though not pushing too hard. The main aim for us was developing through the games, new experiences, adventures etc.; so that she is happy and curious to learn new stuff.

At the age of 3y.3m. she is pretty well developed for her age both physically and intellectually, successfully learns two foreign languages, starts reading, loves drawing and dough modelling, etc. But the most important is that she enjoys life, enjoys discovering new stuff, enjoys to invent her own rules and games, and loves to be independent. Right now she is trying on a new role of being elder sister to her younger brother Andrew, which is difficult and exciting at the same time!

So, certain space in this blog will definitely be devoted to the ways of spending time also with the newborns and babies :)

Outer Space

Mary 2y. 3m.
Mary is very curious about what is going on around us, interested about people and nature. Once I decided to experiment a bit and to tell about the space, cosmonauts, astronauts, Solar System and our generous Planet Earth. We looked at all these fascinating stuff in the book, I also showed her some short movies about our Universe.

Our Solar System - Size Of Planets and Stars to Scale

The reaction at first was rather ambiguous, which is clear as these are rather abstract hard to understand things for babies. However, later after glueing and drawing our Earth and other planets on paper Mary became very much interested in space, stars and planets. We also tried stickers, read books and played cosmonauts flying into space =).

Don’t know what this interest will turn into in the future, but space definitely is worth paying attention to as there is huge potential for development for humanity. But now Maria is looking every evening through the book about space, she has expanded her vocabulary and become more knowledgeable about the nature and the world we leave in. In autumn, when it gets darker earlier, we try to study star sky just above us.

Methods to Develop Early - Maria Montessori

There was conducted a research in US comparing the development of children who went to Montessori school and those, who went to usual school at the ages of 5 and 12. Montessori children did, indeed, better in various fields when tested at age of 5. At age of 12 the difference diminished but still was seen, especially in creativity.

Maria Montessori was developing her education method in the beginning of 20th century putting emphasis on child’s independence, liberty and so called discovery model (not direct instruction). The most important in Montessori method is “prepared environment”, which is specially tailored for the development needs of child. Children themselves know the best what they want to do at the particular moment: to iron or to wash smth, to play with cereal, to study math with specially designed material. Montessori environment is usually separated in zones: sensorial, linguistics, math, space, geography, physical activity.

In fact, every mum can educate her child using Montessori method and create Montessori environment at home. When Maria was 1 y.o., I offered her to draw using cereal on a tray. She was also trying to select the correct cover to each jar, tube etc. She enjoyed these games a lot and I tried to employ these games more and more not knowing about the existence of Montessori method. I think it is more on the intuitive level to give child freedom of choice and organize simple games, which stimulate child’s development.

Arts and Crafts Come with Time

As Maria Montessori writes, the biggest happiness is to watch children, to see how they develop, how they become curious about the surrounding world.

Just I would like to share the observations of how Maria was growing up in terms of developing her creative abilities and her likes/dislikes of the tools to create masterpieces =)

She started going to the toddler’s school when she was just 1y. 4 m., which she enjoyed a lot. There she was offered to try to work with the modeling clay, to paint with crayons, to play with cereal, as well as to dance, make exercises etc.

In the beginning the only thing Maria liked was physical activities and listening to the cheerful songs. Being a bit disappointed with her dislikes of other activities, I was also offering her crayons, clay, paints at home. No result! When growing older (~1y.6m)., the started to enjoy gluing things together. At the age of 1y. 8m. she actively started to work with clay (our flat resembled sculptor’s workshop with pieces of clay being everywhere). Finally, the non-fading desire to draw with crayons came in place, which appeared when Maria was about 1y.11m. Still she is not very much keen on paints (enjoys but for a very short period of time).

So, it will all come with time and every child will try him/herself in as many fields as s/he will be willing ,in order to be able to find their major occupation.