Tag Archives: toddler

What to Do with Plastic Eggs

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eggDo you suddenly have an abundance of plastic Easter eggs in your life? Don’t throw them in the trash!

They can be washed and re-used again and again – Just throw them in a sink (or big bowl) full of soapy water to wash – it takes minutes. Then they can be stored and re-used again the next year. So much easier on the environment than land-filling dozens of plastic eggs per kid per year.

But, beyond just re-using them in one year, there are so many other fun things you can do with plastic eggs! Try some of these before you pack your eggs away for the year.

Egg Hunts: Egg hunts are a fabulous activity year round! (Read my post from last year on what your child can learn by hunting for eggs – counting and math skills, persistence, delayed gratification, observation skills, and more.) Check out this post from Hands On as We Grow, where she links to ideas on spicing up your egg hunts with new challenges. I like this one from Sugar Aunts – the kids have to search for things to fill the eggs with – something yellow for the yellow egg, something red for the red egg… this is just good for color learning, but also a great spatial intelligence builder as they have to think about whether things are small enough to fit in an egg, and fine motor skill builder as they learn how to fill and close eggs.

Shaker Eggs: You can use eggs to make musical shakers by filling with a variety of small objects. (Tape or glue closed if you have little ones who still put small things in their mouths.) Family Sponge has a great post on this, and they and Motherhood on a Dime also suggest a sound `matching game you can do: make pairs of eggs (two with kidney beans in them, two with rice, etc.) Have your child match the eggs – great practice at sound discrimination. Here’s a sound discrimination and math game in one. Fill eggs with objects. Have the child shake and listen and guess what might be inside by the sound. Then open it up and count the objects.

Egg Critters. You can add googly eyes, sequins, pipe cleaners and other decor to create little animals and make paper bag nests.

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Sink or Float: Here’s a Sink or Float experiment from No Time for Flashcards where you fill the eggs with various items and see if they will float. If they sink, add salt to the water – does the egg float now?  Try an experiment where you build a mini, watertight submarine from an Easter egg.

Writing on the Eggs: On I Can Teach My Child, she posted 20 ideas for what to do with eggs. My favorite was Posh Lil Divas word family eggs. eggs   You could also write numbers on one half egg, and then on its partner, draw a number of dots to correspond to that number. Children have to match the 7 dots egg to the number 7 egg.

Filling the Eggs: You can make your own “Kinder Surprise Eggs” by filling eggs with toys and surprises for your child. If you’re ambitious, you could also then cover the egg up with playdough so your child has to peel away the playdough first, then open the egg. (There are countless YouTube videos about surprise eggs…. ) You can also get creative by filling the eggs with materials that lead into an activity.

  • Get a Lego set and divide it up, with the 5 blocks needed for the first step in one egg labelled one, and the blocks for the next step in an egg labelled two, and so on. Do the egg hunt first, then your child can assemble the kit.
  • Divide up jigsaw puzzle pieces between several eggs. After all the eggs are found, assemble the puzzle.
  • Take the magnetic letters off the fridge. Divide them up in 26 eggs. As your child finds them, they put them in alphabetical order, and if any are missing, they know they haven’t found all the eggs yet.
  • Make a lunch of finger food snacks (cheerios, crackers, raisins, blueberries, and so on) and hide them around the house – your child gets to eat lunch as they hunt.
  • Fill the eggs with stickers or beads or other supplies for a craft project.
  • Put finger puppets (or toy dinosaurs or whatever) in the eggs, and each time your child finds an egg, they open it up, and you tell a story about the puppets and the adventures they’re having.

Drop the eggs – engineering challenge: Put a bouncy ball (or similar weight object) inside the egg. Drop it – it will break open, as a real egg would. Now try putting it inside a plastic bag filled with packing materials. Drop it again. Does it break? Continue to design containers and test them (do a search for “egg drop challenge” for lots of ideas.) Once your child has perfected a container, test it with a hard-boiled egg, or if you’re brave, test it with a real one. For lots more egg science activities, check out my Inventors of Tomorrow blog.

Egg Balancing: Frugal Fun had a fun idea: take a cardboard box, mount sturdy straws, dowels or pencils standing upright, and put out with a collection of plastic eggs. Kids can balance eggs on the sticks – it’s a surprisingly challenging motor skills game.

What do you do with plastic eggs?

credit for photo at top: IMG_3987 via photopin (license)

Stranger Danger vs. Social Skills

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handshakeParents of adolescents and college age kids tell me that their kids have a hard time with the basic social interactions of life: ordering food in a restaurant, asking for help finding something in a store, making a phone call to register for a class, interviewing for college or for a job. They try to avoid those encounters whenever they can, and ask for parents’ help when it’s unavoidable. (And likely miss out on opportunities because of the anxiety related to this.) The parents wonder how to teach their kids to talk to people.

Here’s the problem… those same parents often spent their children’s early years teaching them not to do this. They spent years saying “don’t talk to strangers” and are now saying “would you please talk to that stranger??”

When we talk about stranger danger, what are parents afraid of? The “stereotypical” kidnapping where a stranger grabs a child and disappears with them. Does that happen? Yes, there are around 100 – 200 cases of that per year in the United States and yes, that’s a tragedy when it happens. But there are over 70 million children living in the United States! The chance that a stranger will kidnap your child is very VERY small. The chance that your child will grow up into an adult who needs to regularly interact with other people, some of whom will be strangers to them – well, pretty much guaranteed.

The chance that the stranger you encounter is a creepy, dangerous person? Pretty darn small. The chance that they are a perfectly lovely person who could have a pleasant neighborly conversation with you and your child? Pretty darn high.

So, I would encourage us to switch around our approach to assuming that most people are safe to talk to, teaching social skills for basic encounters, and, as they get older, teaching them safety limits.

  • When we have a baby or toddler, we can model smiling, chatting, waving hello with store clerks, waitresses, bus drivers, and people we pass on the street. Our children follow our social cues here and will do the same. However, if we’re waiting for a bus or walking through a “dodgier” neighborhood, we might not engage with anyone around us. Again, our kids will follow our cues. We don’t have to act fearful of the strangers or tell our child to be scared of them – we can just have a few more social barriers up.
  • When we have a preschooler, we can start talking about social skills and when/who to engage. For example:
    • it’s OK to talk to strangers when mom or dad are right there with you, but if your parents aren’t there, don’t talk to the stranger. (There may be exceptions to that rule, like “it’s OK to talk to all the grown-ups at preschool” or “it’s OK to talk to all the grown-ups at church, even if I’m not there with you.”)
    • It’s OK to talk to people who are working in places we go (the librarian, the lifeguard at the pool, and so on.) But, we should keep our conversations with them short, as they have work to do, and may not have time to hear all the details of our day.
    • If your parents aren’t talking with the people around them, probably you shouldn’t either. Later on, you can ask your parents to explain.
    • If an adult makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to speak to them. Mama or Daddy can help you handle the situation.
  • When we have children who are old enough to be out and about without us nearby, then is the time we introduce the idea that all people are not safe, and we teach guidelines to help keep them safe.
    • Again, it’s OK to speak to adults who are working in a place, especially if you need help with something.
    • It’s OK to nod and say hello to people as you pass, but if a stranger tries to engage you in a conversation, move away from them, and to where there are safe adults.
    • If a strange adult says they need help (with directions, with finding a lost puppy, etc.) then go to a trusted adult and let them know.
    • Never go anywhere with a strange adult unless a trusted adult has explicitly explained this to you in advance.
    • Be sure your children know their full names, their parents’ phone numbers, and where the trusted adults are near their home.
  • Also, as kids get older, ask them to use their social skills. If they’re trying to find something in a store or library, teach them to ask for help. If there’s something they need to make a phone call to do, help coach them through it, rather than doing it for them. If they will be doing an interview for college or a job, role play it with them ahead of time.

For more info on teaching about ‘stranger danger’, click here.

Periods of Disequilibrium

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Does it seem to you that there are periods of time when parenting is easy? That you’ve mastered it and you’re cruising along with a well-behaved child whose needs you understand? And are there other periods when it’s all really hard? When you feel like you’re incompetent, like your child is out of control, and you have no idea what they need and the things that used to work no longer work?

Did you know that’s totally normal?

And that all families experience this?

Children go through very predictable cycles, or developmental spurts. Sometimes they settle into a quiet period of equilibrium where they take time to incorporate all that they have learned and practice learned skills to the point of mastery. Whenever they’re on the verge of a new and exciting development, they go into a period of disequilibrium… there’s some new skill they can see and it’s just out of reach, and they are striving toward it with every part of their being and frustrated at everything else along the way.

One of the first developmental spurts is a 6 week old baby… they cry and cry and cry… and then…. they smile at your for the first time and really connect with another person. Lots of 6 month olds struggle with sleep – they’d much rather be figuring out how to crawl. Although we hear about the “terrible twos”, it’s really the one-and-a-halfs and the two-and-a-halfs. The 18 month old knows that other people talk and that helps them get what they want. And yet when she tries to speak, nobody understands! Meltdowns are common at this age. (Learn about toddler language development here.) At 2.5, they have discovered that you set rules and make them do things they don’t want to do. And they rebel against that. You’ll hear the word “No” a lot at this stage! And they get very angry or upset when you don’t do things like they want you to. (Something like cutting their sandwich into triangles when they wanted squares can lead to a huge tantrum.) The more you can follow routines and set clear limits the more manageable this period can be.

These cycles continue throughout our lives. But they get longer… we have longer periods of equilibrium and longer periods of disequilibrium… where that 6 week old baby was out of balance for a week or two, a midlife crisis could last a couple years. One of the most challenging situations is when multiple members of the household are in a disequilibrium stage at the same time!

Expect more hard times at 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, 7, 9, 11, 13, etc.

One hard time for kids is 4.5 years old. When my second child hit this stage, it was really hard. She had been on an easy cruise for a long time. And at 4.5, sometimes she was an absolute delight to be with – so many thoughts going on in her head, a great imagination, lots of budding passions and capabilities. And other times she was so exhausting to be around that I wanted someone to come and take her away!!

She was a rules negotiator and protester. She knew the rules – things like “only two sweets a day” (where a sweet equals a candy or a cookie or juice) and “you need to stay in your room at bedtime.” But, she would say “but today, I can have three sweets” or “tomorrow I’ll stay in my room.” And if I said no, she’d yell, hit, and more.

I thought “I need a book. A book about how to manage this.” I hadn’t felt like I needed to buy a parenting book in years, because I’d been feeling pretty competent. But now, I felt in over my head. So, I went looking for a book called something like “Your Five Year Old” that would tell me how to manage this.

And then, in the bookstore…  I realized I already owned that book.

I’d bought it when my first child was 4.5.

I’m not sure I really read it, because I think she may have moved out of that developmental stage into a period of equilibrium at about the same time as I bought that book. And we went into the smooth ease of parenting a five year old. Just remembering that I had bought the book and that she had moved on from that phase before I read it helped me realize I didn’t need to read a book to manage my second child… I just needed to be patient. It was, in fact, “just a phase”, and she soon moved through it.

And now, it’s child #3’s turn to be 4.5. He was sick about two weeks ago, and after that he became difficult to manage: some clinging, lots of wild behavior, lots of rule negotiating, lots of defying me when I enforce the rules (yesterday he head butted me when I said he couldn’t have a second bag of fruit snacks.) At first, we thought “well, it’s just because he’s been sick. It will get better soon.” But now, I’m coming to terms with the fact that no… it’s his period of disequilibrium. I’m trying to focus on all the joys of where he’s at developmentally (the language skills, the imagination, all the cool conclusions he’s coming to) and remember that “it’s just a phase… and this too shall pass….”

Read more:

Fun with Toddlers: Transportation Theme

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transportThis month’s theme was Transportation: Boats, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Always a favorite theme, especially with the boys! Here are some ideas for transportation activities that toddlers and preschoolers love.

Learning Activities / Crafts

Sorting Cars. Make cardboard garages (or use colored paper to make “parking spaces”) for your child’s cars. Encourage your child to sort the cars by color. Sorting into categories is a great foundational skill for later learning.

Train Car Sort. Make colored train cars, or print a picture of a colorful train, and have your child sort objects by color into the right car.

Shape collage: Make cut-outs of truck bodies and tires they assemble littlefamilyfun.com/2014/01/build-truck.html

Sponge Printed Trains: Use sponges to print colorful rectangles for train cars, then use a black dot marker for the wheels. See on Buggy and Buddy.

Free Play Activities – You Prep, They Play

Draw a City. Use a big box your child can climb into, or flatten out a smaller box. Draw roads and buildings on it. They can drive cars around the roads. You can also build cardboard tunnels to drive through and bridges to go over. You could also try out PlayTape which is tape you stick to the floor which has an image of a road on it.

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Ramps. Take a flat piece of cardboard. Tilt it by propping on a piece of furniture. Race cars down it. Even better, put a tower of blocks at the bottom to crash the cars into. You can play with angles – the steeper the inclined plane, the faster the car goes.

Magnet Car. Draw a road on a paper plate. Make a paper car with a magnet on it. Use a magnet wand under the paper plate to drive the car around.

Bubble Popping Car: Tape bubble wrap to a table. They can drive a toy car or truck over it to pop the bubbles. This is a good strength builder as they have to press hard to pop.

Taped Road Pretend Play: Use masking tape on the floor to mark out roads (or train tracks) wide enough that your child can crawl along them, pretending to be a car (or train). Add cardboard boxes for tunnels, garages, and more. Toddler Approved has great pictures for this idea.

Shoe Box Train: String together shoe boxes and kleenex boxes to make a pull toy train. The child can load up the cars and pull it behind them.

Family Project

Build a Cardboard Car and Have a Drive-In Movie: Use a box big enough for your child to sit in comfortably, and decorate it to look like a car. This can be very simple, or as complex a project as you want. Find the tutorial for making a cardboard car.

Once the car project is complete, celebrate with a drive-in movie. Watch your favorite movie – you can sit on the couch, they sit in their car. Serve popcorn!

An Activity for Outside the Home

Counting Cars. Any time you find yourself with time to kill, count the cars going by. (Great counting practice!) Label them: blue car, red truck, gray car, delivery truck, and so on. (Great for building vocabulary and the idea of categories!)

Songs to Sing about Transportation

The Wheels on the Bus. https://kcls.org/content/wheels-on-the-bus/
(Also, search on YouTube for lots of fun videos of this song!)
The wheels on the bus go round and round, Round and round, round and round,
The wheels on the bus go round and round, All through the town.

Down by the Station https://kcls.org/content/down-by-the-station/
Down by the station early in the morning. See the little puffer bellies all in a row.
See the engine driver, pull his little lever. Puff puff! Toot toot! Off we go!

Drive the Fire Truck. https://kcls.org/content/hurry-hurry-drive-the-fire-truck/
Hurry, hurry! Drive the fire truck! Hurry, hurry! Drive the fire truck!
Hurry, hurry! Drive the fire truck! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

Motorboat.  https://kcls.org/content/motorboat-motorboat/
Motorboat, Motorboat go so slow (set your child in front of you, their feet against yours… hold their hands, and rock back and forth as you sing)
Motorboat, Motorboat go so fast (rock faster!)
Motorboat, Motorboat step on the gas! (go really fast!)
(Repeat, but this time, end it with “run out of gas” and putter to a stop.)

Games to Play / Circle Time Activities

Motorboat Activity: Do the song above, but have them walk when you say slow, jog when you say fast, run when you say step on the gas, and fall down on run out of gas.

Train rhyme: I’m a choo-choo train; (walk in circle)
Chugging down the track. (rhythmically move arms)
First I go forward,  Then I go back. (walk forward and back)
Now my bell is ringing, (pretend to pull bell)
Hear my whistle blow. (cup hand to ear)
What a lot of noise I make (cover ears)
Everywhere I go!

Red Light, Green Light. When you say green light, they can walk. When you say red light, they need to stop. (Advanced version: when you say yellow light, they can keep walking, but need to slow down.) This is a fun game, but also great safety training. When your child is headed out into the street, you say “red light” and they know to stop!

Sensory Activities

Tire Tracks. Drive toy cars on play-dough to make tire tracks. Or, squirt paint on a big piece of paper, and drive cars around. Or, drive them in a sensory bin full of dried rice, grains, or beans.

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Bulldoze the Beans: Add toy bulldozers to a bin of beans.

Car Wash: A tub of soapy water and some toy cars is lots of fun.

Books to Read

Freight Train by Donald Crews. Teaches colors and names of train cars.

My Car, Trucks, Planes, Boats, Machines at Work by Byron Barton.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. by Mo Willems. Very silly. Best for 3 years and up.

There are many different illustrated books featuring The Wheels on the Bus lyrics (I like the Pete the Cat: The Wheels on the Bus) and Row Your Boat (I like Row, Row, Row Your Boat by Cabrera.)

More ideas (and source citations) at: www.pinterest.com/bcparented and https://gooddayswithkids.com/songs-and-activities/fun-with-toddlers/

Check out this article on: “Obsessions with trucks, trains, or cars make kids smarter.”

Resources for Choosing Child Care

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I’m often asked for advice on choosing a child care or choosing a preschool. Here are some great resources about what to look for, and questions to ask. They also offer referrals to child cares in your area.

https://www.naeyc.org/our-work/for-families – The National Association for the Education of Young Children. They have great resources on choosing child care (see the infographic at the bottom of the post). I like that they divide off sections on quality care for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, because although you’re looking for many of the same things, there are also differences in what counts as quality child care for a 3 month old and a 3 year old. They also have a directory to search for NAEYC accredited child care centers and preschools.

https://www.childcareaware.org/families/choosing-quality-child-care/ Child Care Aware of America. They have great articles on choosing child care, and also a state-by-state list of: agencies that do referrals, child care licensing regulations, inspection reports, resources for children with special needs, and more. A fabulous resource!

There is also https://childcare.gov/consumer-education/find-and-choose-quality-child-care.

from naeyc.org
from naeyc.org