The Sunday Parenting Party - Winter Wonderland or Winter Battlefield?

 (Goblin is 4 years old)

The other day I started despairing. I'd left Goblin a Winter wonderland invitation to play. It has cute winter animals, a lovely mirror lake, glitter playdough and glass beads. I'd been really pleased with how lovely it looked.

When Goblin found it in the morning he looked excited. Yey! I thought, for about two seconds. Then he carefully removed each of the animals and replaced them with military tanks. Seriously? Even my beautiful winter wonderland has to be turned into a battlefield. What is it with my son and war play?
He is fascinated by vehicles, and since visiting Duxford Imperial War Museum military vehicles are his particular fascination, but somehow I had fooled myself into thinking that the magic of Christmas and my sweet snow scene would change his modus operandi.

So I sat and silently fumed for a while that he wasn't playing as cutely as I'd hoped. But when I stopped feeling so aggrieved that I was unable to direct his play to what I considered appropriate for the set up, I noticed what he was doing. He'd fetched his Tank Spotters guide and he was looking up his toys to check which tanks he was placing in his battle.
How could I stay annoyed when my son was educating himself, and using a book even though he can't read. So I got over the idea that my creation shouldn't be sullied with shooting and banging, and instead embraced the child led element. We had a lovely chat about the Second World War and Russia's involvement. We talked about how cold it must have been and how many Russian soldiers weren't properly trained.  And then we had a 'snow ball' fight and buried all the tanks.

My take away lesson is not to assume my child will play with something the way I would. And that following my child's lead can actually lead to learning I may never have initiated myself. 

*****

Great reads from last weeks link up included
Three phrases no parent wants to hear ~ Lemon Lime Adventures
A world of pure imagination ~ Cuddles and Muddles and Muddy Puddles
The Not So Terrible Twos ~ Seeking Shade

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If you are linking up please grab a button and pop it on your post or in your sidebar so others can find this linky and enjoy yours and others posts. Many thanks.

Welcome to The Sunday Parenting Party, hosted by Dirt and Boogers, Play Activities, Crayon Freckles, Taming the Goblin, The Golden Gleam, Prickly Mom, and The Tao of Poop. The SPP is place for readers to find ideas on nurturing, educating, and caring for children, as well as honest posts about the stresses of being a parent or caregiver. Links to reviews and giveaways are welcome as long as they are relevant to the topic. All parenting philosophies are welcome with one exception: please do not link to posts promoting physical discipline, as this is something we would feel uncomfortable having on our blogs. (P.S. By linking up you agree that your post and photos are Pinterest, Sulia, G+ and FB friendly. We will be showcasing ideas on The Sunday Parenting Party Pinterest board.)

Scissors, Straws and Playdough - What would your child do?

(Goblin is 4 years old)

If you gave your child scissors, drinking straws and a lump of playdough and left them to make their own play, what would they do? 

Do you think you know? Why not test your hypothesis?

Last week my friend and I set out to see whether presented with the same invitation to play our kids would act in a similar way, or differently. In carrying out our mini (not very scientific) experiment, we both took a lump of playdough, some drinking straws and a pair of decent scissors, laid them out for our child to find and then left them to their own devices. We remained present to assist if asked, but we did not offer any prompts or hints as to how they could direct their play. Here are the results:

Babybird's focus was on the straws. She carefully cut lengths of straw. In fact she wanted the straws to be equal lengths so she asked her mum for a ruler. She measured the lengths and rejected any that she cut to the wrong length. Then, using the lumps of playdough that had been left for her she pressed the acceptable lengths into the top. She explained to her mum that these were hedgehogs. 

Her play lasted about half an hour and while she didn't return to the equipment for further play, she was not keen for her mum to destroy her hedgehogs and insisted that they were packed away as they were.

Goblin on the other hand ignored the straws entirely. He decided to cut the "skin" off the playdough. This led him to shred the entire ball of dough into tiny chopped up pieces. My initial conclusion was, while Babybird had created, Goblin had destroyed. However, I shouldn't have been so hasty with my assumption. Goblin then sought out his toy construction vehicles. He used the playdough as rubble and created an imaginary play setting where his vehicles sang and chatted as they worked. Then he fetched his crane (which has playdough tools attached to it). He created playdough barriers and lined up some toy people behind the barriers, to keep them safe as they watched. Then he started making playdough balls in a mould. 

This inspired a new direction to his play. He created a bunch of these cannon balls and loaded them into his aircraft carrier, then he set up a 'baddy boat' and fired the cannons at it. He then got distracted.

Later in the day Goblin returned to the equipment. This time his theme of choice was imaginary food play. First he served me chopped up straws (spaghetti) and playdough balls (meat balls). And then he made himself an ice cream. He started to open our jars of small loose parts and he created more ice creams with 'toppings', this time for his play people. He got our montessori money tray and gave the people coins to pay for the ice creams, and asked them all what flavour they'd like. We used this opportunity to do some coin recognition, before Goblin decided to use the coins to decorate the ice creams too. 

This simple invitation to play can offered a fascinating insight into how our children think and how their play evolves. Why don't you try this with your child and please leave a comment letting us know what your child did. 

Simple activities to replace screen time

(Goblin is nearly 4)

If you have read some of my earlier posts you will know that we are trying to cut back on screen time and reconnect with Goblin through play in an attempt to rid our lives of tantrums. There are periods in the day where we'd normally fall back on TV, and these are the times that for both him and me it helps to have something planned, an idea for an activity to replace TV. Because these are normally the times when Goblin is most tired the activities need to be simple. Here are a few of our more successful ones. 

Sensory play

This little invitation combined shells from our recent beach holiday with dried seed heads from the garden: poppies; honest; something that looks like cornflowers when its in flower. I also put out some military vehicles because for Goblin no play is complete without them. And finally I made some nice smelly playdough: orange (because I didn't have lemon scent to match the yellow) and rosemary. I used the ever reliable Nurturestore recipe. 

Goblin had great fun emptying the poppy seeds into the playdough and mashing it all up so the yellow dough became poppy seed dough. Its not what I had intended from my set up, but its one of the things I love about leaving something for your child to explore. They will take their own direction and sometimes it will surprise you. 

And talking of surprises I didn't expect Goblin to play with the coffee grounds the way he did. I'd taken the idea from TheBoyandMe's blog.  I loved the way her son had put the coffee grounds on the mirror and made patterns with them using a Q-tip. But my little Goblin had other ideas and he got all his construction and farm vehicles and played at moving "mud". He meticulously filled his truck using a tiny digger. I loved how much fine motor practice he was getting unintentionally.

And when he'd done with playing in the baking tray he asked to empty it into the mat and added some cloud dough. Then he called it snow and asked me to help him make a snow plough. Somewhere behind the cardboard is a miniature A-team van covered in tape.

I got this play dough idea from a lovely blog called Play Trains. I couldn't resist the idea of it smelling so great with the cinnamon stick logs and the clove ties in the chocolate playdough. So I invested in 4 jars of cinnamon sticks - Not the cheapest activity ever. I also made a bit of a mistake using drinking chocolate rather than cocoa in the playdough. The sugar made the dough quite sticky. In addition I tried to replace some of the flour with the drinking chocolate - let me tell you now, this doesn't work. However, when my playdough disaster had been averted this was a seriously popular activity with Goblin. He played with it on and off for two days. He even got all the component parts out on his own during some independent play time.

Art 

 We collected some lovely big stones from the beach on our holiday, and one of our activities was simply painting them.

I painted half a picture, an autumn tree. I invited Goblin to paint the other half. He did a great job painting what he called "the wind". But I think I made it too complicated and he got nervous about trying to replicate the rest of the tree. Next time I will make a simpler picture.

 This was a fun activity. I left out some solar system stickers. Goblin started by sticking them on the black paper I'd provided, but Hublet was a much more attractive canvas.

Numeracy and Literacy

I've been trying to provide Goblin with some simple number recognition games. This one was initiated by him playing "shop" with Hublet, using his toy till. I simply added some prices to the items on sale and showed Goblin how to use the calculator - not so much to add up, but more to match the numbers to the numbers on the key pad. We aren't at addition yet.

This was a letter matching game that I laid out with his afternoon snack. He named the objects and then decided if they were T or D words. He was surprisingly good at it. I've done a few other number and letter activities that I will share in later posts.

I'm sharing this at

The freedom of the beach

(Goblin is nearly 4)

Montessori, Waldorf and Reggio educational techniques all pay a lot of attention to the learning environment. While on holiday in Wales I started to realise what an amazing learning environment the beach can be. 

One of the main reasons that the beach offers such wonderful opportunities for kids is actually the effect it has on parents. Parents on the beach tend to be more relaxed, less rushed and less bothered by mess, noise, and other things that can be annoying when cooped up in the environment of the home. 

This leaves kids free to play and learn, discover, test, experiment. They can dig, and move stuff around without risk of chastisement. They can make land art or tap into their imagination and turn a beach into any setting they want.

They get to do things that need big open spaces.

They can fling themselves about with less risk of injury.

And even the messiest of messy play can be washed off in the sea. 

They have freedom in space and freedom in time - what better learning environment could you have.  

 

Kids Coop - Citrus Sensory activities

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Its Kids Coop time, please link up your kids activity posts and check out what others have been up to. This week I am linking the following:

*****
(Goblin is 44 months)

Last week we had a citrus day. I bought some lemons, limes and oranges and made a series of activities. Like at his Montessori nursery I left them out around the room so Goblin could choose which he engaged with. 

My activities included a letter learning and mark making activity; a scissor practice and letter learning activity; and a fine motor grating activity. 

Goblin wasn't interested in the two letter activities and spent only a short time on the grating. What he really enjoyed was the hands on smell, touch, taste and sight activity. 

This is such a simple activity. I simply cut up some fruit and squeezed some juice from each into a shot glass. Then I let Goblin taste the juices, and encouraged him to smell and touch the fruit. And then we ate some. He drank the orange juice first and enjoyed it. But he screwed up him face when he tried the lemon and wasn't daft enough to get stung a second time by trying the lime juice, but he did smell it. 

He wanted more of the orange juice and asked me to squeeze some more. He really enjoyed watching me squeeze the juice and talked about it a lot later in the day. I realised that another learning aspect to this is the child gets to see where fruit juice comes from. 

The final activity I'd laid out was sensory play with tapioca gloop. It is literally tapioca boiled in water for 30 minutes with food colouring. It is seriously gloopy and Goblin was not impressed. 

However not to be defeated I moved the bowl to the bathroom and had a play myself. As I was squishing it through my hands Goblin came and joined me and asked if he could add some water. This was a really good idea because it made it less slimey. When I scooped some out they looked like mini water beads. It reminded me of BlogMeMom's post on edible water beads which uses giant tapioca pearls.

I dashed down stairs and brought up a sieve and some big spoons (and a whisk at Goblin's request). And we had a good old splash about with the tapioca and ended up stripping off and throwing at each other while in the bath. 

Today was definitely a sensory play day rather than a letter learning and mark making day. I'm glad I prepared a selection of activities so Goblin could gravitate towards those that appeal to his current needs. 

And now to the linky 

Small World Snow Play

(Goblin is 37 months)

Today Goblin woke up to a snow storm. Not a real snow storm, a play one I'd laid out before I went to bed last night. I am a total hypocrite. I wrote a post just last weekend on how kids don't need elaborate play, and then I go and do it this. The thing is I haven't done it in a while and I do love walking in to the living room with him when he discovers a play scene waiting for him.

I made snow by grating four bars of cheap white soap. It was so cheap that it was squidgy so I could mould some into snowballs. It also smelled lovely - coconut scented. The great thing about soap snow is when your child has finished playing with it you can either add some water and mash it back into a soap ball for washing, or you can keep it for wet felting.

 I also made some peppermint playdough. I always use Nurturestore's easy recipe which doesn't involve cooking - just boiling water. Where playdough is concerned I go on the theory that if you find something that works you should stick with it. I added peppermint essential oil to make it smell nice (Goblin has a cold so this was good for his sinuses) and I used some glitter for wintery sparkles.

In the Autumn I collected a whole bunch of pine cones. I painted them white in the hope of making some beautiful ornaments to hang on our season tree. Unfortunately, while they looked amazing when first painted, they closed up as they were drying. I had heard that pine cones do this - there is a post about it on Science Sparks - but to be honest I hadn't really thought that paint would make them do it. Anyway my beautiful open pinecones turned into rather boring shrunken ones. So I covered them in glitter and donated them to Goblin's play scene as trees.

 I have conceded that no matter what play ideas I come up with Goblin always defaults to his diggers. So rather than fight this I thought I would accommodate it. So I added his bulldozer and dumper to the snow to create a snow shovelling scene.

Goblin was suitably impressed when he found his little snow storm. He spent a good part of the morning moving the snow from one part of the mat to the other with his many digger and dumper toys. LAter in the day he added gravel to the snow (not a problem as the soap can be separated out by washing). And eventually he took his "forest" apart and rolled the playdough into balls and carted them around in one of his bigger trucks. All in all this was a very successful bit of sensory play as it kept him going on and off through out the whole day.

I'm sharing this with