Written on September 2nd, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Uncategorized
Missy 2 and Mr 4 had fun in the Spring weather making amazing chalk drawings. Missy 2 is obsessed with drawing, and she does it often. It’s good to let them experience different ways of doing things they love.
This activity held Mr 4′s attention for a long amount of time. His drawings are becoming more detailed, and he is putting more mental planning into his art as he gets older.
Drawing is an important part of childrens’ play. It gives them an opportunity to be creative. It’s a great fine motor activity, yet it’s also highly cognitive.
I added water to the chalk bucket to let the colours really ‘pop’. This is also a good thing to do if anyone involved has asthma, it can reduce the amount of chalk dust floating around somewhat. Although, as Missy 2 soon learnt, we still end up wearing the results of our work!
Daisy, our lovely puppy, insisted on being right in the thick of all the proceedings, of course. Once the children tired of drawing, they had a nice run with the dog. What a fun start to Spring.
Missy 9 made this beautiful butterfly. Playdough appeals to all ages.
Home playdough is special. There’s no denying it. Sure, it’s fun for kids to play with the store-bought stuff, but there’s nothing like the smell of freshly cooked playdough to bring back fond childhood memories. When I smell it, I remember our old Playgroup hall and I can hear the noisy feet of my peers echoing on the floorboards. I hear table legs screeching as mums drag them away from the walls and set them up for us to play happily at.
What I love about making playdough yourself is that you get so much more to play with than what you’d buy in a lousy, plastic playdough can. It’s also great that it costs next to nothing to make. Playdough brings many benefits to the child, apart from being messy, good fun.
Playdough helps children to:
- strengthen and develop fine motor skills (use of hands)
- engage in creative play
- play dramatically, as they make up stories about what they’re making. It’s common to hear children making up pretend voices of their creations’ characters.
- develop their cognitive skills. Children use trial and error, cause and effect and basic experimentation to manipulate the dough into what they want it to do. They learn to problem solve.
- further develop their language. Children love to talk about what they are doing with their sculptures, and this in turn allows them to socialise with other children or adults.
- experiment with different tools and learn about how they work.
- watch how colours change when they are mixed together
How to cook playdough
You will need:
4 cups of water
4 tablespoons of cooking oil
4 cups of plain flour
8 tablespoons of cream of tartar powder
2 cups of salt
Dump all the ingredients into a large saucepan or frypan. I like this gigantic non stick electric frypan, because it’s less likely to spill over. Before you turn the heat on, mix it well. It should look like this:
Turn the heat on to medium-low (my frypan heats up very rapidly, so I have to watch this. You don’t want it to burn or develop a crust along the bottom). It will start to thicken and look lumpy. This is normal.
Now, just stir constantly until it is a lovely, firm playdough consistency. Put it aside to cool before adding any goodies to it.
Once it’s cool, there’s so many things you can add to your playdough. Kool Aid can be used to colour it, or food colouring. You can even try beetroot or spinach juice if you and your kids are feeling experimental!
But don’t feel that you have to stop at colour. Sight is just one of our senses. Why not appeal to your child’s sense of touch, with some glitter shaken in, or some coloured rice? To colour the rice before adding it, shake some rice and food colouring together in a jar and spread it out to dry before adding it. It looks best if the playdough colour is a contrast to the colour of the rice. Below is red and yellow food colouring added to rice.
It looks pretty, but children enjoy the granular sensation, and they notice a difference when flattening it with a rolling pin, or cutting it with a knife or a cookie cutter. This in turn often leads to much discussion! Why not throw some hundreds and thousands in for a mighty crunch? Then the children can watch the colours blend.
And what of our sense of smell? I’ve already mentioned how pleasurable the smell of playdough can be for a child (or adult. Ahem), so play around with that, if you will. You could make coffee playdough, mint scented playdough, just look around your kitchen and garden to see what you have.
The batch in the picture below has been mixed with Kool Aid and coffee, to encourage the children to experiment with different smells. We have cherry flavour, grape, tamarindo, lime, and raspberry. This cooked playdough recipe makes a large amount, so it’s excellent if you want a large variety of playdough types, or have a lot of kids using it either at home, playgroup or daycare.
Uncooked playdough
Sometimes, you might just want playdough quickly, and couldn’t be bothered cooking it, waiting for it to cool, yadda yadda, yadda… Or your kids might be keen to help you make it. Or, you might be at Playgroup and want to quickly make some for the kids, and not have time to cool it down before using it. My uncooked playdough recipe is handy for those times.
You will need:
3 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 and 1/4 cups of water
Plain flour for dusting
Colouring of your choice
Mix the first three ingredients together with your hands. Then turn it out onto a bench dusted with flour, and knead it until you are happy with its consistency. It should be just like bread dough.
Separate into the desired amount you’d like for each colour, then knead the food colouring through. Or you can use some of the suggestions mentioned in the cooked playdough recipe.
One thing that’s lovely about uncooked playdough, is that if children make it, they can give it to friends or family as a nice little homemade gift. We kneaded a little glitter through part of the batch for a little extra sparkle.
Fun ways to play with it.
The ideas here are endless, but I’m going to give you some good ones to get you all fired up.
- using bare hands only.
- rolled into ‘sausages’ and children encouraged to cut it into pieces with scissors. This is an excellent way to familiarise children with scissor use and strengthen their little muscles in preparation. It’s also much easier to cut playdough with scissors than paper when a child is starting to learn.
- provide an old garlic press and let the kids watch the playdough squish out like spaghetti. Again, this is great for fine motor strength.
- raid your useful box for straws, lids, cupcake cases etc for your children to add to their play.
- give your children rolling pins and cookie cutters to play with. We’ve not unpacked our rolling pin since the move yet, so I improvised and gave the kids this empty tissue cylinder.
Make sure to store your playdough in some cling wrap or a sealed plastic container. It’s great to encourage the kids to help pack up, too!
Mr 4′s caterpillar. He became deeply engrossed in this activity.
Now, to make life a little bit easier for anyone who likes to make their own playdough or fingerpaint, not only can you find the recipes at Hear Mum Roar, you can also download them in a handy printable format to keep in the kitchen. Click here to download.
I’d love to hear what your kids like to do with their playdough.
Edited to add: Here’s where Aussies can source Kool Aid (not sponsored links, just adding on request):
Now, I was planning to teach Missy 9 how to finger knit and crochet soon. I found out today that her relief teacher at school has already been teaching them to finger knit today! The whole class is obsessed and my daughter tells me she is addicted. Can you see how hard she is concentrating?
Missy 9 was keen to show my lovely readers how she finger knits:
We start with a loop on our finger, much like the sort of loop you’d make to start knitting on needles with.
Wind the wool over your finger, away from you.
Pull the original loop over the wool you have wound over your finger, and off. Kids love watching the chain grow, and grow, and grow! My daughter wants to make hers grow as long as her school basketball court!
If you’ve ever wanted to teach your child to crochet, finger knitting is an excellent starting point. It’s not quite so fiddly, and because our fingers are bigger than a crochet hook, it’s easier to see what’s meant to happen.
I gave Missy 9 a crochet hook and some wool from my studio, and encouraged her to try to make the same finger knitting chain on the crochet hook.
This was a bit more tricky! But not at all impossible. The only difference really, was that I had to teach her to wrap the wool on towards herself, as opposed to away from herself. It was also tricky for her to use the hook to pull the wool through the loop, but it’s fine when they’re learning to just pull it over with their finger, the same as they do when they finger knit.
I can’t think of a nicer way to spend a cold Friday afternoon than snuggling up with my daughter, dabbling in wool. Do your kids love wool too?
Missy Two has been a real, typical toddler of late, in the games she likes to play. I mentioned recently how she loves to post things, and here’s another example of a toddler classic: the pull along toy. It doesn’t have to be a store-bought toy, you could make something similar for your child out of the useful box.
Gumboots and underpants worn over jumpsuits are the latest in winter fashion. Just sayin’, in case you didn’t know…
Examples of pull along play can be a bunch of train carriages, a car on a string, this walk-along puppy you see, heck, we even have a pull-along elephant that has been handed down to us! It’s good if the string isn’t too long, so that they can’t wrap it around their necks too easily and strangle themselves. If your child has made up a game with something that is too long, you’ll need to supervise. But you guys know that, right? Yeeah…
The appeal of simple games such as pulling things along is the basic repetition. Toddlers love repetition. Missy Two will pull this puppy loudly along our floor boards back and forth…
They like the sound the wheels make (if it has wheels, most pull along toys do, but homemade toys might not), learning about the concept of pulling, enjoying the challenge of trying to keep the toy steadily upright (in the case of wheels, generally) whilst pulling at the same time. It encourages a certain level of coordination, as the child looks back to check the toy is how they want it to be, they keep moving as they walk, and they work out, via trial and error, how to do this without the toy coming up off the floor. Whew! That’s hard work!
As they gain competence at this simple task, they will repeat it over and over again, for the sheer joy of it all.
My older two children are still enjoying pull along toys also. But in a different way. They like to sit on top of our pull along elephant, as our puppy pulls them along by the string! So cute, and it gets a lot of giggles out of the kids.
Do you have anything your kids like to use as pull along play?
So, you may have just read my post about how we decluttered a bunch of plastic out of our kitchen. Missy 2 spontaneously started posting with a container that has a pour spout on it.
What is posting? Well, it couldn’t be simpler. It’s putting something in a hole. I’m ignoring your snickers by the way, this is a family site! Hehe.
Toddlers love the repetition of putting in one object after another, taking them all out, starting again.
A toddler can learn so much from such a simple task. They enhance their eye-hand co-ordination, they learn about concepts such as ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘through’, ‘push’ and sometimes, ‘open,’ ‘close’. If an adult talks with them about what they are doing, they can reinforce the words as a language experience. Posting can take on a dramatic part in childrens’ play, too.
Do you have anything around the house that your toddlers play posting activities with? The ideas are endless!
A few days ago, it was Mr Four’s birthday. It feels like only yesterday that he joined our family.
I remember when Missy 9 was about two and a half years old. I had a vivid dream that I had twin babies. I woke up, and I knew I wouldn’t be having twins, but the desire to have a second baby was now alive. My darling partner was just as excited and enthusiastic about my idea when I told him. It only took us three months to conceive Missy 9, so we were sure it wouldn’t take long at all.
Three years later, after discovering that I had endometriosis and having surgery to remove it, I was finally pregnant again. By this stage, we were unsure if we would ever be blessed with a second child together. I’m sure many can imagine just how excited we were.
I got to have a beautiful bump again:
Missy 9 had started school, and was five and a half years old by the time he was born. She desperately wanted to be there for the birth, and we agreed to this, as long as she was prepared well in advance. Considering that my first birth was induced and a month early, I really felt inexperienced with this pregnancy on so many levels. I’d never had Braxton Hicks before this second pregnancy, so this led to several false alarm visits to the hospital. I also worried that I wouldn’t know when I was in ready to give birth, as that was decided for me last time.
At the ultrasound, it was very obvious that we were having a boy. Missy 9 came with us, and was a little dissappointed as she was hoping for a little sister. But we were glad it gave her time to accept it.
In the last week of my pregnancy, I felt very anti social and just plain over it. I went to the school in the afternoon to pick up my daughter on a Friday, and a friend told me she had a feeling I’d have my baby on the weekend. I nearly cried, not believing her!
Saturday morning, I woke up to my waters breaking, I started labour like a normal, un-induced woman, and had my baby at 11:35am. Missy 9 and my partner came too, and I had a lovely water birth. If only all of my births could have been this easy!
I was amazed at how relaxed and pink waterbabies are! As soon as I pulled him out of the water, Missy 9 squealed, ‘awww, he’s so cute!’ The midwife took him to the other room to clean him up, and my fiance and daughter watched. They came running back to the bathroom where I was, like two little kids to tell that our son had made his first cry/sound: ‘Wah.’ No mucking around, just ‘wah.’
It’s never been a dull moment since he entered our lives.
Which brings us to now:
How did he come to be four so quickly? My god, in two years’ time, he’ll be at school. We had a great celebration for his birthday, and I’m so glad to know that with his dare devil antics, he’s actually survived this long! Haha, we love you, son.
I’d like to welcome our new little girl into our family: Daisy! She’s a boxer/cattle cross, six weeks old and so cute and tiny.
I have always had a soft spot for dogs, especially boxers. My parents had two boxers, one after the other. They are friendly and protective with kids, and make a fantastic guard dog. Both of the boxers my parents have had, have been totally silly clowns.
The children have been much more gentle with Daisy than they were when we first brought Sookie into the fold. They have really taken to heart our values of being kind to animals. She has already brought so much happiness into our childrens’ lives, and of course, us oldies as well. She just makes us melt. Aww…
Written on May 25th, 2010 by Hear Mum Roar in Uncategorized
It is almost Winter here, and already the weather’s freezing. Last week, we bought a leg of ham from Aldi for only $25, and amazingly it has been really lovely ham, despite being half the price we’d normally pay at a larger supermarket or butcher. We’ve enjoyed having it sliced into ham steaks with eggs and sliced for sandwiches. But now it’s whittled down a bit, we wanted to make sure there was enough meat left on to make my favourite pea and ham soup.
My fiance has been nagging me and nagging me to blog about this, but I thought, ‘everyone knows how to make pea and ham soup, don’t they?’ But then I remembered last year, describing it to my Greek girlfriend on the phone, and she’d never heard of it, let alone tried it. So, I’ve succumbed to my fiance’s pressure, and here it is in all its yummy glory. Perfect for a chilly evening dinner.
Have I mentioned my three year old son has an aversion to meat? Whilst he is outgrowing some of his dinner time battles, it can still be a challenge to ensure he gets everything he needs at dinner time. I told him I was making this soup today, and he begged me to let him help. I know Missy 9 would’ve loved this activity and could’ve learnt a lot about the peeling and chopping of veges, but alas, she was at school, and it had to be put on early. It was a treat for her to arrive home hungry to the smell of hot pea and ham soup cooking, though!
At this point, I should mention we are currently stove-less and oven-less. We’ve decided in the next month or two, we’ll buy a new stove/oven. We originally only had a stove, but the gas bottle ran out (gas isn’t billed out this way, we buy bottles) and we couldn’t justify buying a refill if we only plan to use it for a month or so. We prefer electric, so that’s what the new model will be. Anyway, this is why this soup was cooked in the crock pot (or slow cooker, whichever you prefer to call it). It was great, it meant my son could stand safely on a chair with the crock pot turned off, and help out.
We were a great little team; I chopped veges and he put the ingredients in. So, for your pleasure, my son will walk you through the recipe:
As you can see, we left a lot of meat on the bone for this soup. You can buy ham hocks without having to buy a whole leg of ham like this, but we find with our family of five, there’s not usually enough meat for everyone to really have a good helping, so I now prefer using our leg of ham at the end of the slicing stage. Pop it in…
We add a whole bag of dried, green split peas (also known as blue boilers)
If you cook this for long enough, the peas just fall apart and become part of the liquid. It also makes it really yummy and thick.
Next, I chopped the vegetables and my son added them to the pot. This batch included: potato, carrots, onion, celery and parsnip. My father (who got me hooked on this soup as a child) believes that a soup is not a soup unless it always has an onion and some celery in it. I’ve made pumpkin soup without it, so I’m not quite as fussy! But, I always aim to get it into this soup, because it does give the flavour I like.
My father, since I was nine, also used to get me to chop all the veges for our soups on a Sunday afternoon. He taught me about ‘cook’s privilege’, which means you get to sample the food as you go. I didn’t have to tell my son about this concept twice!
Here he is, nicking carrot and celery straight from the pot… Next, all there was to do was to cover it with water, put the lid on and turn it up high.
Usually for slow cooker meals, it’s great to be able to simmer them on low all day, but I find with this soup, I have to crank it up high, or it’ll take forever to boil. Or that could be just my slow cooker, I’m sure different models would vary. We put this soup on a little before lunch….
Dinner time!! It was a meal that my son enjoyed, and not only did he eat all his meat, and everything else, he came back for seconds! He’s so proud that he ‘made it himself’. (My cutting the veges is a mere technicality that we don’t dwell on)
A quick note before I go: my facebook ‘like’ page is down at the moment, it’s a long story… The lovely Violet Le Beaux had the misfortune of having one of her beautiful nail art photos stolen and used by a nail salon’s ‘like’ page at facebook. They cropped off her watermark and plastered their own watermark over it and tried to pass it off as their own work. A number of us reported this copyright breech and made some comments on the ‘like’ page because we were outraged. It turns out that a number of their photos look to be stolen. I made four comments on the ‘like’ page: one in the review section, one as a comment where they displayed her photo, and two on the main wall (I initially only intended one comment, but as an afterthought, went back to post a link to where Violet’s original photo was on her blog). So, for now, my facebook account, including the Hear Mum Roar ‘like’ page, is disabled. I am appealing the decision, and hope to have it back soon.
It is embarassing to have this happen when I have 102 members on the ‘like’ page thus far, and was looking forward to growing that membership, and I do hope it doesn’t reflect badly on me as a blogger. I feel very strongly about copyright breeches, plagiarism, heck, theft of any kind! I hate thieves, especially when they steal from bloggers such as Violet who are brimming with creative energy, raw talent and a strong work ethic. It’s lazy and unprofessional. Prior to this, I had never had any complaints/warnings/reports from anyone for bad behaviour on facebook, so I hope that helps my case somewhat. I’m not saying this from a ‘woe is me’ angle, just a brief explanation for those who were using the page, or about to sign up. I feel it’s a courtesy to you to explain where it is.
I’m sure it will be back very soon, and it’ll be onwards and upwards!
This is the last installment in my tantrum series.
Last time I wrote about tantrums, I touched on public tantrums and just how stressful and difficult they can be for a parent or carer to deal with. I talked about how busy the adult is, possibly already stressed by the errands they are running, then the child who is tantrumming, which is finally rounded off with an unhealthy dose of public interference.
This post is for anyone who’s ever judged another parent or carer of a child who had a public tantrum. Or worse, criticised or undermined a parent/carer’s best efforts at dealing with the tantrum. I write this in the hope that a parent/caregiver/child is treated better by a stranger as a result.
Dear stranger, please respect how we manage our child/rens’ behaviour.
Nobody will ever agree 100% with another parent/carer’s approach to behaviour management, but as long as the child is not being abused or put in danger, please respect that we may do it differently to how you would, and that is our right. To publicly criticise us, especially in front of our child, undermines our authority as parents, and then if they end up in juvey at 13, you will no doubt blame us, the abovementioned parents because our children ended up having no respect for us.
To throw another method/technique/idea into the works would be confusing to the child anyway.
Do not interrupt an adult dealing with a child having a tantrum
Do not talk over the parent. Do not say within the child’s earshot, ‘oh, that’s alright, he can have it!’ If the parent has said no, that needs to be respected. Do not confuse the child.
Do not stare/tut/shake your head at parent or child.
Both already feel embarrassed, stressed and frustrated. One day this could be you. Or maybe years ago, it was you, and you’ve conveniently forgotten this fine detail.
Can you do something to help?
Years ago, when my first child was two, I was trying to walk home with her, carrying far too many plastic bags of shopping. My daughter was refusing to walk, and was trying to wrestle her way to the ground and run to the road. I was trying to carry her home quickly, and juggle her and the bags. It was quite the spectacle.
Next thing I knew, a lady around my age came outside, and my guard instantly went up. Oh my god, I thought. She thinks I’m beating up my child. Or she’s going to tell me I should be. Instead, she asked me how far away I lived, and if I would like her to carry my bags so I could carry my daughter home more easily. Of course, I didn’t want to put her out, but she reassured me I wasn’t, so I said yes.
As we walked home together, she asked how old my daughter was. On telling her, she replied that she had a little girl at home the same age who would love to play with her! We exchanged numbers, and our two little ones ended up having quite a few playdates.
Most of the time, a parent or carer wants to be left to get on with the job of dealing with their child without interference. What if there were more people in this world like this lady, who offered to help with some other part of your errand and left you to deal with your child unhindered? To offer to unpack your trolley onto the conveyor belt as you managed your child’s behaviour? Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if more people did this, rather than stand and gawk or criticise?
What do you wish others would do when your child has a public tantrum? And by the same token, what could you do for another parent in this situation, without undermining that parents’ methods?
So, we’ve talked about what causes tantrums, ways we can prevent them and how to build up our childrens’ communication skills to help get through the tantrum stage more smoothly. But what about if you have implemented all of these strategies and your child still has a tantrum anyway?
Relax. Remember, it’s a normal part of a child’s development, and it’s nothing you’ve done wrong. It can take time for a child to learn to accept that not everything will happen they way they want it to in life, all the time. I have focused more in this series on understanding the motives behind tantrums and preventative measures, because I believe that it’s all the work we put in here that pays dividends.
I’ve yet to meet two parents who’ve ever agreed 100% on the best ways to raise children. Most parents and carers have varied yet passionate opinions on how to deal with a child who is throwing a tantrum. I’m going to reiterate that these ideas are only my approach, and I enjoy open discussion on the wide variety of ways other parents deal with it. Don’t be afraid to be creative in your approach, try your own ideas. You know your child better than anyone else in the world. As always, let’s respect each others’ differences and let everyone have the freedom to have the floor with their opinions.
With that little disclaimer out of the way, I’m going to focus on the tantrums where a child doesn’t get something they desperately want. I have a few ‘constants’ that do not change, regardless of the childs’ age:
I don’t say no, then say yes after the tantrum.
Your child wants an ice cream. For whatever reasons, you’ve said no. Child screams, maybe even throws themselves on the floor. This is stressful for parents and carers. Often it seems easier and so tempting to just say, ‘oh, alright then, you can have the ice cream!’ If you do this, I guarantee that the tantrum will stop instantly. I also guarantee that your child will throw more tantrums in the near future and will probably take longer to move out of this tantrum stage of their lives.
What happens when a child is given in to like this, is that the child is rewarded for expressing their wants in an inappropriate way. No, we don’t expect perfect behaviour from a one year old, or a three year old. It’s normal for them to try to see what will work for them. But it’s up to us to teach them better ways to express this. When we teach our children that screaming for what we want doesn’t achieve the desired result, over time they become capable of finding other ways to ask for things, also to accept that sometimes it’s no.
What would happen if we applied for a job and didn’t get it? Asked a potential love interest out on a date and were rejected? Would kicking and screaming help the situation? No. Does this mean that we expect our children to behave like adults at all times? No. We expect our children to try inappropriate behaviour, and then we repetitively teach them what the actual expectation will be of them in the real world. We spend this time preparing them.
So if it’s no when my child first asks, then it’s no after they’ve had a tantrum too.
Ignore the tantrum.
Now, I don’t want people to say, ‘but what if they’re hungry/tired? They’re upset because they need something!’ Yes, I agree. In those cases, if that is the cause, as I’ve already covered in previous topics, you deal with it. But today I’m talking about dealing with tantrums where a child does not like hearing the word, ‘no’.
I find that a child tantrumming over not getting what they wanted is much like dealing with someone who is ranting when they’re drunk. You can’t reason with them during the rant. I personally choose not to reward the behaviour with attention. Once they have calmed down, then I will talk to them about the situation. I am a strong believer in letting a child have their thoughts sometimes. Giving them time to themselves to reflect on what they are doing. Thinking about if it’s even working. I remember back all the way to two years of age in my childhood. I remember throwing tantrums. One of the most loving things my parents did for me was to leave me alone with my head, and let me make sense of it. If I am concerned that my child is in danger or putting others in danger, then I move them somewhere safe and leave them to it.
Create a diversion.
I’ve added this idea more for the very young tantrummers, say between the ages 1-2 years old. Because their attention span can be shorter, often we can redirect the behaviour towards another activity or interest. A child may be ready to scream for that ice cream, but if we can say, ‘look Gretel, there’s a fire truck! It’s big and it’s red and let’s go play with it/look at it!’ sometimes the child will forget all about it.
Some may consider this rewarding the behaviour. I disagree. They’ve forgotten their tantrum, and they didn’t get the ice cream, did they?
