Playtime: Don't Get Rid of Those Soft Toys - They're Actually Good for Development!

When Em was born, I couldn't believe how many soft toys we got as gifts and I remember thinking at the time - what on earth are we going to do with all of these? Well, fast forward almost 10 years and our soft toy collection has at least quadrupled in that time and doesn't look like shrinking any time soon!

Soft toys are great for development. Their sweet little faces and soft furry ways help encourage empathy, compassion and caring. They can also be a reassuring source of comfort for a child who is feeling sad or insecure. There are plenty of ways to encourage soft toy play.

For Babies 
Have a basket of 3 or 4 accessible for baby play time. Choose toys that do not have any loose bows or buttons that can fall off. It's great if the toys have smaller limbs or a tail that baby can grab and hold onto. Remember that babies will always put toys in heir mouth so make sure no bits of fur or fluff can come off.

Baby will practice using her fine motor skills grabbing her soft toys and will feel happy and secure looking at friendly, kind faces. She may also enjoy kissing and cuddling the toys and older babies might even start to like to feed them a bottle or some pretend food. You could also add a soft baby brush so she could brush her fur.

For Toddlers
Soft toys are great play companions for toddlers. They can be put into bags, prams, boxes, carts, baskets and ride on cars and taken out again. This is one of toddlers' favourite things to do.

A toddler will play out social situations with her soft toys and help to look after them. This works on her empathy, compassion and caring skills. Playing out social situations also helps your toddler to make sense of her social world and her place in it.

For preschoolers and older children
Preschoolers and older children will enjoy constructing entire imaginative worlds for their soft toys. Your preschooler will perhaps start by making voices and acting out a role using the toy. With this kind of play, the toys are the centre of the imaginative process. They will need props or accessories which can be created by your child, bringing in the possibility of a range of art and craft activities too. Over the years we have made teddy jewellery, back packs,  shoe box beds, tissue box cars, school books, invitations, hats, clothes, just to name a few.

Your preschooler or older child will work on his social and emotional skills during this kind of imaginative play activity. He will play out social situations he has been in and will use the toys to play out different outcomes. By giving his toys different personalities, he is learning to look at situations through other people's eyes and reinforcing what he knows about caring. Making and creating props and accessories for toys works on fine motor skills as well as literacy and numeracy skills.

Fun Soft Toy moments

Some teddy bear jewellery as modeled for a PP photo shoot

Teddies in an indoor tent

A soft toy, a shoe box and a ramp - hours of fun

A homemade shoe box bed  - Good night!

'Focus on' Friday: Fine Motor Skills

On Fridays from now on, I’ll be focus on specific topics relevant to the Early Years that I think are important.

Today I want to focus on fine motor skills.

I found this definition at http://k6.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/linkages/ContentLinks/links_fmskills.html and I think it sums these skills up beautifully.

"The components of fine motor skills can be considered to be:

• Grasping -eg using a crayon, pencil, brush, glue stick, beater, blocks
• Manipulating - eg playdough, clay, unifix, centicubes, paper, sewing, scissors, fingerplays
• Hand-eye co-ordination - eg writing, cutting, threading, moving a cursor, using a glue gun"

I’ve always thought of fine motor skills as having two components –

• strengthening and building up the muscles in the fingers, wrists and hands; and then
• training the brain to manipulate those muscles effectively.

These muscles develop according to how much they are used and which means it’s really important to think of ways kids can use fine motor skills everyday. Of course, the best way to do this is through fun, open-ended play.

Some play activities that are beneficial to fine motor skills are quite obvious. Like

Threading

Drawing

Painting

Gluing

Lacing

Using scissors

But there are loads of other activities that use fine motor skills too ...

Playing with plastic animals and toy cars

Playing with playdough

Digging in sand

Squelching messy goop, slime or yoghurt

Serving pretend ‘food’ with spoons and tongs

Mixing

Putting on dress up clothes

Doing puzzles

Building with small blocks

Dressing dolls

Feeding dolls and giving bottles

Pouring water

Turning the pages of a book

Singing songs that involve actions like “Where is Thumkin?”, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, “Open, Shut Them” and “Incy, Wincy Spider”

Doing puzzles

The best way to build fine motor skills is to practice, practice, practice and when this practice is linked in with a play scene, game or activity your child really enjoys, he won’t even realize he’s doing it.

Unfortunately, poor fine motor skills can have a devastating effect on your child’s self-esteem. The inability to write and draw along with friends or perform basic tasks like putting on jackets and doing up buttons can make a child feel terrible, I’ve seen this first hand. The best way to help a child overcome this is to get them involved in one of the play ideas above as often as you can and to find the help of an Occupational Therapist to assess your child and help him fine-tune his skills.

To get an idea of what fine motor skills are developmentally appropriate and different ages and stages, there’s a great “Fine Motor Development Chart” on the Sensory Processing Disorder website which you can look at here. The “National Childcare Accreditation Council” and “Fingergym” both have some more detailed info on fine motor skills if you’d like to read more too.

Holiday Fun With A Deck of Cards

We've just returned from a fabulous trip to sunny Port Douglas. It's one of my most favourite places to visit and this year we hired a house so that we could have a bit of space for just lounging around. I packed quite a few toys and things to do. I wanted the kids to be able to keep themselves busy so I could do some important things (like reading and sitting and looking at mountains and rainforest!).

One of the best things I packed (well actually, I didn't, my husband did) was a deck of cards. I spent many hours playing with cards as a kid; there are really a lot of fun things to do with them.

Here's a few:

Sorting the cards

It's fun to sort and classify the cards in many different ways. You can put all the reds in one pile and all the blacks in another. You can put all the hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs together. You can put all the numbers together and you can even put the cards in numerical order from lowest to highest or highest to lowest. Each time the cards are sorted in a different way, it builds on important maths skills and sorting and classifying is just as important as counting and ordering.

Playing Card Games

Good old “Snap” is a great game for kids to start with and children as young as 2 can often get the hang - even if you start by just matching black and red. It builds on concentration and reflexes as well as helping to identify numbers, colours and symbols. It's also heaps of fun and guaranteed to get participants laughing. Unfortunately it sometimes gets participants crying too, but learning that you can have fun without "winning" is also important.

Older kids will enjoy games that are slightly more complicated. My hub loves a good card game and has taught the kids to play something called "2's and 3's". It's something he used to play when he was a kid. There are loads of great card games for kids and I think the best thing to do is try to remember what you enjoyed.

If you have no idea, you could try these ideas from About.com

Solitaire

I taught both the kids how to play “Clock Solitaire” and they both loved it. It was a real favourite of mine when I was young. It's the easiest to learn out of all the “Solitaries” and is great for concentrating, remembering, learning numbers and time as well as working motor skills when handling, shuffling and dealing the cards.

Here's a link to how to play "Clock "Solitaire" if you've forgotten the rules.


Building Card Houses

My kids had the most fun (and frustration!!) with this old fave. It was actually great for Em who sometimes finds it hard when things don't go the way she wants them to. It really worked on her patience, persistence and acceptance. Ed had great fun too, controlling his muscles and sense of balance to get the cards sitting just right.

Ed's Masterpiece

Making A Recipe Book

Em has always loved to help in the kitchen and lately she has felt confident enough to try recipes on her own. I thought it would be nice for her to make a recipe book where she could write down the recipes she enjoys. I was wanting a recipe book for myself too - to hold all those delicious dishes that take my fancy in the hundreds of food magazines I buy. I thought it would be a nice idea to sit down and make our books together.

I collected up a couple of exercise books, some scissors, glue and some catalogues and food magazines.


We looked through the magazines together, cutting out pictures of food and ingredients we liked and then organised them to cover the books.


I needed to show Em how to think about where to put the pictures once they were cut out, but she soon got the hang of it. She actually took off the pictures we'd laid out together and started again on her own.

Here's the finished products:



To protect our books, we covered them in clear contact.

This was a great activity because it:

• Worked on fine motor skills and eye-hand co-ordination
• Helped with spatial awareness
• Built on creative expression
• Enabled Em to practice her planning skills
• Gave us a lovely opportunity to spend some quality time together, sharing something we both enjoy.

Ed wanted to have a go too, but he didn't see his book through to the end. As with most 4 year olds, he was just happy to sit alongside us cutting and gluing, exploring and experimenting until he had had enough. Unlike his 7 year old sister who was quite focused on her outcome, Ed was more interested in the process.

It's so important to not discount the experience of this type of activity for younger children, just because a tangible outcome isn't produced. It was still a valuable experience for him as he:

• Spent time with his Mum and Sister
• Practiced gluing and cutting
• Talked about all the things he saw in the magazines
• Discussed what he likes and doesn't like
• Shared his knowledge and learnt more about food groups and nutrition.

It's great how one activity can have such wonderful benefits for 2 children at completely different stages of development.

A Happy Compromise

One corner of my lounge room looks like this at the moment.



Ok, so it's not going to get my house into an issue of "Home Beautiful" any time soon, but this little space is really working for us.

As I've mentioned before, Em likes to set up her own play a lot at the moment. She likes to move when the mood strikes her and it helps to have resources and toys at her disposal.





Having furniture, accessories, doll's and animals accessible like this means she can play when it suits her and if she wants to leave things a little set-up and come back later, she can take up exactly where she left off without too much hassle. And in the meantime, I'm not left looking at a huge amount of mess which makes me a bit happy too!

A Beady Good Time

When Em had her 6th birthday, she had some friends round and I bought a few bags of beads to put into a large bowl so they could all do some threading together. Those beads got put into some containers and put into the cupboard and during the holidays, we re-discovered them again.

I got the box out, which was a great big mess, and left Em to thread on her own. She decided she wanted to sort through the beads instead, so I got out a bunch of plastic containers form the recycling box in the cupboard and we started to sort.

We sorted them into colours and had a great time looking at each one and talking about the shapes, sizes and colours.


After a while Ed joined in too.

When we'd finished the kids made some necklaces for their teddies.

Ed had never done anything like this before and I was actually surprised how much he enjoyed it.

Luckily, we still have lots of beads left to do some more threading soon.

Setting Up Lego Play

Lego has been the toy of choice here over the last couple of days. I haven't met many kids over the years who don't love playing with those cheerful, colourful, perfectly-sized little blocks.

The benefits of building with Lego are enormous. It
- works the fine motor muscles really, really well
- develops eye-hand co-ordination and spatial awareness
- builds on planning skills
- helps concentration
- brings attention to detail
- works pre-literacy skills when kids follow instructions to build something specific
- can be a wondeful medium for building imaginative play elements

I like to set it up like this.



I find it is much easier to find specific pieces when I take a few minutes to put the Lego into baskets and plastic containers. That means there's not a massive bucketful tipped out all over the floor and the kids don't need to break out of their creative momentum to go searching. That leaves more time for building, learning and fun!

Lots of fun with a Marble Run

One of our all-time favourite toys would have to be our Marble Run. I remembered the kids at kinder absolutely loving this toy, so I bought one for Em (well, Santa delivered one) when she was around 2.



She has had hours of fun with it and in the past year or so Ed has started to really enjoy it too.

It is something that requires a reasonable amount of adult-help to begin with. I've taken the time to build some runs with the kids so that get an idea about how it works.

But, once they get the hang of how it works, it allows for lots of opportunities to problem-solve, plan, build, co-operate, negotiate, follow instructions, imagine and create on your own, hypothesise and then of course, there's the irresistible fun of sending lots and lots of marbles scooting down the run.



If you don't have one at your house, I highly recommend it. It's worth investing a bit of money on one with lots of pieces and sturdy construction and buy an extra bag of marbles for even more fun!

When Baby becomes a Toddler ..

My lovely god-daughter is now 19 months old and, I have to say, looking after her is a much busier time than it used to be when she would sit exactly where I put her.

The first time I looked after her after she started confidently moving around was quite a challenge and I really had to re-think what toys I put out for her to use and where I put them. This led me to write an article that is feautured on pg 66 of this month's "Practical Parenting" magazine - called "Baby on the Move"

It's all about how life (and play) changes after baby starts to move around and includes some ideas on "play stations" to set up for a baby who has just become a "toddler". These play station ideas are really open-ended, so they suit children aged from around 9 months, all the way up to children who are almost 2. They can be varied according to the interests of your child.

When I did this for my little Ally, she played independently for over an hour, keeping herself busy with what I had set up. I just made sure I wasn't far away so she could come and visit and play near me if she needed to and I also made sure I checked in on her every now and then, asking her questions and showing her toys she hadn't discovered yet.

Here is what I set up for her:

A dolly to feed

Some furry friends

A place to hide (her favourite thing)

Some baby toys and musical instruments

Some noisy buttons to press

Interesting animals

Somewhere to sit

Some light reading

A basket of pegs

I spread everything out around the loungeroom so she could move about and explore

This was a couple of months ago now, but I looked after her just the other week and did a similar set up, with the play stations just a little more elaborate now she's older. She still had her cubby, but I added some blankets, food and a high chair for the baby and also set up a pretend cooking area for her.

The wondeful thing about these play experiences is they can keep little ones busy and engaged for long periods of time. Setting small staions up around the room like this allows children to go from one thing to another (as young children are prone to do) and then back to things they enjoy, without getting bored. It also gives them lots of opportunity to
- practice motor skills
- problem solve
- explore
- have an effect on their environment
- create and imagine
- concentrate
- use their memory
- practice language skills
- play out things they see mum and dad do

I'm looking forward to her next visit. I have some ideas up my sleeve taht I can't wait to try out. I'll keep you posted

Positive Puzzle Play

My little boy got some money for his birthday and do you know what he wanted to buy? A puzzle. They are his absolutely favourite thing to do at the moment and he keeps trying to challenge himself further and further.

The puzzle he wanted was one he spotted a couple of weeks ago and it made a big impression. It was 100 pieces and I was a little worried it would be a bit out of his league and put a dampener on his enthusiaism.

I had nothing to worry about, he did it in a couple of sittings. He is really proud of himself and he should be. It's proven to be a great boost for his self-esteem as well as providing the wonderful benefits doing puzzles provides.

Being able to do puzzles is quite a specific skill and I thought I would share with you some of the tips and ideas I use to encourage positive puzzle play.

1. Start young - the kids have both had puzzles since they were very young. Most baby puzzles are the kind with large knobs that involve the skill of matching shapes to a particular space. This is one particular skill, but the type of puzzle that involves putting a picture back together is a different skill again. It's great to get your hands on 2, 4 and then 6 piece puzzles where younger toddlers can work on recreating a picture to complement the "matching shape" type puzzles.

2. Don't have too many out at once - too many puzzles are confusing and messy. Try to have just one or two out for young children and three or four out for older children. That way children don't get confused for choice and the puzzles pieces don't get messed up. I tend to have the easier puzzles on an accessible shelf for everyday play and then harder ones put away for times when the kids are looking for something to do.

3. Give children time to do harder puzzles - it's great if you can leave harder puzzles set up somewhere undisturbed so that children can keep going back to it. Ed's puzzle was on his toybox in his room

4. Choose puzzles that have interesting pictures - I'm not a huge fan of "character" toys and branded items, but puzzles are one case where I make an exception. If kids are really interested and excited by the picture, they're far more likely to do the puzzle.

5. Try not to take over - Some of my more frustrating teacher moments have been whilst sitting at the puzzle table with a child attempting puzzles for the first time. It's so easy to take over, but it's really important to let them work it out for themselves.

Lots of kids will ask "Where does this piece go?", but it's great to encourage them to look at the pieces and see which ones look like they go together and start there. You can ask the child to look for all the pieces of a certain colour, or choose a particular part of the picture to re-create. I find this works really well and if children work on a small piece at a time, the puzzle ends up coming together.

I know as adults we tend to do the edges and corners first, but I find this is quite complicated for a young child to understand. It is possible to explain that some edges are smooth and others are bumpy, but I find the picture/colour technique works better.

Puzzles are great fun and work on spatial awareness, observation, perception, recall, memory and fine motor skills. They also provide opportunities for problem solving and language development.

Ed has his eye on a 300 piece puzzle his Dad had when he was a boy. It's a picture of a 1970's race car and the pieces are tiny. I'm not convinced he's quite ready for it, but I have been wrong before ............

We Play - With Matchboxes and Tiny Things

I bought some matchboxes from the craft store quite a few months ago now and Ed found them the other day while he was going through one of our toy cupboards.

He stuffed the matchbox with some other tiny treasures he found and came to find me. I had to guess what was in the matchbox. In the beginning, he made it multiple choice. Once I'd guessed correctly a couple of times, he changed the rules so that I got no clues.

Realising this was something he was quite taken by, I quickly collected up some more tiny treasures and displayed them near where he was originally playing.



You can see in the photo I gave him some buttons, pom poms, fairy stones, small babies, nuts and bolts and some small pieces of felt that we had cut up to use as baby blankets.

He kept playing the guessing game for almost half an hour and then got a few of his dump trucks out to carry the small items around as 'loads'.

With these little lovelies he was giving his development a workout too. He was building on his:
- fine motor and manipulative skills
- eye-hand co-ordination
- language skills
- ability to develop strategy
- problem solving

Little things are so much fun!

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up

Inspiring Play

Some of you might be surprised to learn, I don't really play with my children very much. Sure, I've been known to put on the odd dress-up and I've certainly eaten a lot of pretend food and drunk many cups of pretend tea, but it's not very often I sit and play with them for long periods of time.

This is completely deliberate. I think child's play is and should be a child's domain and too much involvement by grown-ups can actually remove a lot of the benefits play can provide.

Don't get me wrong, I always keep an ear out to hear how they're playing and I think a lot about what they play with and how they might use it. I also 'check-in' often to ask about what they're doing and offer help and suggestions if it's needed. I guess I try to inspire play and help the kids to build on their own ideas. I think it's really important for their problem-solving, imagination, creativity and ultimately their self-esteem

A great example of this happened on the weekend. The children were busy building with some 'mobilo' close to the kitchen where I was preparing dinner.

Em came up to show me some of what she'd been doing. She had made a perfectly working see-saw. Always keen to extend on what they're doing, I said to her "that would make a great see-saw for one of your 'Littlest Pet Shop' toys, wouldn't it". "Yeah" she yelled and ran back to where she was working to share this new information. "Ed", she said "my 'Littlest Pet Shops' could fit in this see-saw and in all these other things we made". "We could make Littlest-Pet-Shop-Town" he said.

So, they set about it with a new purpose to their building and an extra dimension to their play.





This idea turned a couple of hours of building into an imaginative play game that grew and evolved and blossomed for the whole weekend, giving so many areas a developmental work out. The kids were building on many, many skills including:
- imagination
- creativity
- problem solving
- fine motor skills
- eye-hand co-ordination
- planning
- negotiation
- language skills
- story-building/literacy skills
- concentration



I'm still not allowed to pack it up today

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up

5 Fun things to do with Junk Mail and Magazines

...that help with development too!

Do you get lots of junk mail or buy lots of magazines?

Well, we get loads and I buy loads, so we always end up with plenty of recycling.

But, before it goes out to the bin, there are lots of ways to use print material to help development along. Here are just a few really simple suggestions:

1. LOOK THROUGH THE CATALOGUE OR MAGAZINE TOGETHER


Suitable for: All ages
Work on your child’s language skills by looking at the pictures together. Point to things and label them. After a short while point to something your child knows and ask them “Do you know what that is?” Encourage him to take the lead and start identifying things he knows by asking “Can you see anything else you know?” Children will soon be volunteering information and asking questions. Your baby will benefit from looking at objects he is familiar with, a toddler will enjoy talking about what he already knows and a pre-schooler will enjoy learning new words and also a little bit about the world he lives in as well as volunteering what he has already worked out.

How this helps development:
Children learn language primarily by listening and practicing. This activity gives your child a chance to practice words he already knows and also gives him the chance to learn new ones.


2. CUT OUT PICTURES THAT YOUR CHILD CAN SORT THROUGH
Suitable for: Toddlers and Pre-schoolers
Cut out pictures from a catalogue of food and grocery items. Get two pieces of paper and some glue. Toddlers can sort the items into “Things you can eat” and “Things you can’t eat”. Pre-schoolers can sort the items into “Healthy foods” and “Unhealthy foods” or “Fruits” and “Vegetables” or “Grains” and “Meats”, any categories that are of interest.

How this helps development
This helps develop your child’s ability to sort and classify objects which is a very important mathematical skill. It also helps him to think a little about the world and how it is organsied. It is also a great opportunity for him to learn and think about nutrition and where foods come from.


3. IDENTIFY FEELINGS
Suitable for: Older babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers
Look at the faces of people in magazines. Talk to your child about the different expressions on peoples faces. You can start a conversation about it by saying “That person looks happy/sad/angry/embarrassed” Ask your child why they think the person looks that way. Offer some suggestions yourself. Try to look at a wide range of emotions and encourage your child to talk about them. After a little while ask your child “What makes you feel happy/sad…etc”. You could also ask him to show you what he looks like when he feels those things. You could pull some funny faces yourself if you're in the mood!

How this helps development
Being able to identify, label, express and manage emotions is a crucial part of your child’s emotional development. Looking at the emotions of others teaches empathy and helps your child to think about the fact that everyone has feelings that are influenced by outside influences. Seeing the feelings of others also makes him feel better about his own feelings. Also, a secure, non-threatening conversation about feelings with you makes him aware that feelings are important and can help him to feel safe to discuss feelings at other times.


4. CUT IT OUT


Suitable for: Older Toddlers (with supervision) and Pre-schoolers
Give your child scissors, glue and paper and allow him free reign to cut and paste things that are interesting to him. Talk to him about what he's cut out and why they have chosen certain pictures. (Make sure you supervise younger children when using scissors, but remember, the best way to master a new skill is to practice, practice, practice)

How this helps development
This helps the development of the smaller muscles in your child’s fingers and hands which are very important when your child comes to learn to write. It also helps with eye-hand co-ordination and builds on your child’s confidence as he works on mastering a new skill.


5. RIP IT
Suitable for: All ages but particularly babies and toddlers
Allow your child to flick through the pages, feeling the textures, crinkling and tearing the pages. The pages of magazines and catalogues have many different finishes to them, some are glossy and some are matte, some pages are hard to tear or turn and others are easy but all pages make a great noise when they are crinkled or torn.

How this helps development
Your small child uses his senses to explore the world. Allowing him to use these senses is very important to his sense of security and comfort and is really important for brain development. Ripping and tearing paper and turning pages provides him with many different sensations and allows him to explore his environment. This activity also does wonders for strengthen fine motor muscles in the fingers, hands and wrists

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up

Making 'Clothes'

I used to take pictures of the kids at play long before I started this blog. I've always put a lot of thought and effort into the toys and materials I provide for them and I liked to look back on the fun things we'd done. The other day I stumbled across this photo of Em and remembered a great fun activity I used to set up for her.



It was around the time when had just turned four and her favourite things to do were to play with her soft toys and plastic animals and do art and craft activities (nothing's really changed!).

I used to get all of her larger plastic animals out onto the kitchen table, along with textas, stickers, long strips of paper, scissors and a stapler.

She would 'dress' each animal one by one in the decorated strips of paper, designing, sticking and stapling as she went.



Then she would line them up in an "Animal Fashion Parade"

Of course, she could never resist making something special for Hamley too.



This activity is not only great fun, it also
- helps her to master the use of sticky tape, scissors and staplers
- gives her practice in measuring and estimating
- works on creativity and imagination
- builds spatial awareness and eye-hand co-ordination
- helps her to practice her drawing skills
- builds on her language skills as she talks about what she is doing
- and gives her yet another way to express and explore her interest in animals

I was thinking it would be great to use wrapping paper as well. I wonder if those trains and cars would like some clothes too?

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up

I'm Playing Along at Childhood 101

Christie at Childhood 101 has created "We Play", as a special part of her great blog. It's a weekly link up where people can share their play experiences and ideas. I think it's a wonderful idea and I'm glad to be a part of it.

Christie says in her post introducing the idea that she believes play is a child's 'work'. I absolutely believe that too. It's what they do to grow, learn and develop. It also gives them a sense of purpose and helps them to work out their place in the world, just to mention a few of it's benefits.

But, as parents, I also believe it's kinda our 'work' too. When we bring these wonderful, sweet beings into the world, it's our job to care for them, to love them and to help them grow. So, it's our work and responsibility to take play seriously, to encourage it, allow time for it, to value it and nurture it and to advocate it's importance at every opportunity.

So well done Christie and everyone else who is getting involved. Here is my favourite play experience from our house this week.



What's going on here?

I made these 'roads' last year sometime. They usually live outside, but with the weather being so cold and wet here in Melbourne at the moment, I've let a few outside toys come in. This has given these roads a new lease on life. They have been used as roads/ramps/bridges and platforms leading down from our stairs.

The kids have put various things underneath them as support (you can see a couch cushion here) and have used small and large cars, animals and trains with them.

These two humble pieces of wood have led to many discussions about scientific ideas (physics mostly) and how to solve problems. These discussions have naturally arisen as the play has gone along and my two don't even really realise the learning that is going on.

You see, big cars don't drive so well on the narrow pieces of wood, so their configuration needed to be modified for that. Some cars veer off, so that needed to be fixed with some angle adjustments. Sometimes Ed wants the cars to go fast, other times slow and again, modifications need to be made. He has solved all of these problems on his own or with a bit of help from his big sister and while doing so has cemented a foundation for scientific learning later in his life.

All the while, the kids have been strengthening fine motor skills while moving the objects around, building on language skills while talking to each other about what might happen, what has happened and how things need to change. Not to mention working on social skills as use of equipment is negotiated and conflicts are resolved.

So, two pieces of wood sanded and painted equals lots of learning and lots of fun.

Come over and play at the 'Childhood 101' 'We Play' link up