Guest Post: Natural, child-led play with babies and toddlers

This post on Natural, child-led play is from Anna at The Imagination Tree. She beat me out for Blogger of the Year at the MADs and a more lovely and deserving person couldn't have won! Her blog has loads of creative play ideas and she's sharing four of her favourite toddler activities here.

Treasure Baskets: Open-ended thinking and learning can be encouraged from a really young age and doesn't require any expensive toys or take up loads of space! It's really easy to make your own treasure basket for a baby to play with as all of the items can be found around the home and are better for baby to play with than brightly coloured, noisy plastic which offers only a couple of different stimuli. Treasure baskets encourage investigation and exploration using the senses of touch, sight and taste. They also help to promote thinking skills and curiosity by challenging the baby to wonder "what should I do with it?" or "what happens if I combine these two materials?" etc. 

Discovery Boxes: These are the term I've given to a toddler version of the baby treasure baskets. Every now and then I collect some simple materials such as cardboard tubes and beans, sellotape and scoops and put them into a large box for the girls to get stuck into! As with the treasure baskets, the idea is to step back and watch them play without interfering or suggesting what they should do, only joining in if asked. I find they can stay engaged with these simple items for so much longer than with their usual toys and they spend a lot of time thinking, collaborating, experimenting and having great fun! I've got a collection of the different items we have put into our Discovery Boxes on my site, if you need some more ideas! 

Musical Instruments:  Following along the same principles as the treasure baskets and discovery boxes, it is so easy to put together some makeshift musical instruments for plenty of hands-on experimenting with noises and sounds! Music making is crucial for building listening skills, distinction and perception and investigating cause and effect. It's also one of the vital building blocks for pre-reading so that one day they will be able to hear and distinguish sounds in words, pick up rhythm and hear intonation. Making "music" is as simple as opening the kitchen cupboards to pull out the pans, wooden spoons and metal utensils! Then have a great bash-a-long to some nursery rhymes or chants! If you want something more "sophisticated" you can make shakers easily using dry rice or pasta in a plastic bottle, stretching a balloon over a tin can for a drum or even make your own rain sticks! 

Messy Play: Last (but probably BEST!) comes the delightful messy, sensory play! Again, no money is really needed for this apart from a few essentials from the kitchen cupboard. Make your own play dough and keep it for 6 months or more, using it to strengthen hand muscles and as a tool for learning letters, numbers and more. Making Goop like Blondie did is cheap and easy, too.  Create sensory tubs filled with dry rice, pasta, lentils, pom poms and allow your little one to investigate with hands, scoops and spoons. (Watch smaller toddlers so that they don't put anything in their mouths.) Other ideas for investigating in deep table trays are water, sand, shaving cream, jelly, wood shavings, beads and lego! Whatever you have on hand will be of interest!

How to make Goop (Toddler Arts & Crafts Fun)

Today was a miserable and rainy day; not really uncommon in Glasgow but still not nice. NotBlondeHusband had very kindly volunteered to tidy up the living room but that meant Blondie Boy and I needed to find something to do. While BB loves putting things away he also loves pulling things out so not really conducive for a proper tidy up. So arts and crafts it was for us!

I decided to attempt some craftiness and make some Goop. The Goop I'm talking about has nothing to do with Fishsticks Paltrow and is more a slimy, slippery concoction that can be both semi-solid and liquid--basically it's really cool to kids and really messy.

I found a few different recipes online but basically it's just corn starch (corn flour in the UK) and water. A few recipes said equal parts and a few said 2:1 so I just threw in all the corn starch I had and them started with 1/2 that amount of water and added more. I also threw in some flour and baking soda as I didn't have a lot of cornstarch and some purple food colouring to make it fun.

You can see it's liquid but also holds it's shape and basically that means it's fun to play with and a good textural experience for toddlers or something like that. You grab a handful and it immediately turns to liquid and drips down your hands!

Since NBH was already cleaning downstairs I didn't want another mess to clean so we played with our Goop in the tub. In all honesty it's not hard to clean up as when it dries it turns into a chalky powder but playing in the tub meant Blondie Boy had a large canvas to paint and splatter and I could hose him and it down afterwards. I'm glad I added the food colouring as that meant he could also use it like finger paints, too.

It all washed off of both him and the tub with just the power of the hand-held shower head and because I used food colouring it didn't stain him or our tub. It was cheap, easy, messy and fun--everything you need to please a toddler and parent.

What's your favourite cheap and easy toddler craft/art activity?

Save the Children: End the Health Care Worker Crisis

If Blondie Boy gets ill it's a ten minute drive to his doctor; if its closed we phone up NHS24 for advice or go to out of hours clinic. All his health care is free including prescriptions. I don't have to weigh cost or time of his treatment against how ill he is. African mothers do. Half of the 8 million children who die each year are in Africa, yet Africa has only 3% of the world’s doctors, nurses and midwives. You don't have to be a math genius to look at that statistic and know what needs to happen.

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Save the Children need your help and I'm not asking you for anything other than your name. Please take action and sign this petition urging the Prime Minister to help solve the global health care worker shortage by urging him to:

1) Attend a high level event during the UN General Assembly where the UK and other governments make commitments to fund, train, deploy and support more health workers.
2) Commit new and additional support to help key countries strengthen their health workforce.
3) By the end of the year,  articulate how the government will support countries to deliver on the UN Global Strategy on Women’s and Children’s Health.


If you want to write your own 100-word post and link it up then that would be pretty kick ass, too.  Just get the word out and help to reach that 60,000 signature target before Tuesday 20th September when the lovely Christine Mosler, who went to Mozambique to follow the journey of a life-saving vaccine and Liz Scarff will be making noise on behalf of Save the Children at the UN Summit in New York. 

If you are American and want to do something you can visit Save The Children USA's action center where you can become an advocate and write your member of Congress.

That's not too much to ask to help save a child's life is it? 






Thank you to the lovely women at NetMums for sponsoring me to attend the conference.