This is part three of my anger in children series. In the first post, I talked about inappropriate ways my son has been expressing his anger. I believe it’s important for anyone, kids included, to have the right to feel anger. To feel it fully and be allowed to express it. This series isn’t about stopping your children from getting angry. Anger is a part of life, and is normal. This series also isn’t about raising perfect little robots who are seen and not heard.
Anger is healthy
I want my children to learn to let their anger out in constructive, healthy ways. I believe this is an unhurried process, which comes with life experience, practice and boundary-setting. Missy 10, for the most part (we’ll say 99% of the time) is great at expressing her anger appropriately. This isn’t because she’s in some way a ‘better’ child than Mr 4. She’s older and has maturity, life experience, practise and years of her parents’ teachings under her belt.
She certainly wasn’t always this way and went through all the same struggles our son is facing now. When things get difficult with my son, I console myself with this reminder! It’s interesting to note that when she was four, she was behaving much the same way, and I was the one who was sick, and ended up in hospital for surgery! So bizarre…
Get it all out
I have a list of ways we can redirect our children’s anger. They allow children to vent without doing harm to anyone.
- Have a bath, swim or general water play. Water is very soothing to children.
- Any physical play that gets their energy out.
- Pillow fights!
Work with your child’s personality
It’s good to experiment with these ideas until you find what works for your child. My son benefits the most from pillow fights or anything physical. (Since the blow-up he had two days ago, he has been telling me when he feels he needs a pillow fight and I set the timer for 10 minutes. Once we’ve thrashed it out, and the timer goes off, we stop. I had to bring the timer in, otherwise he’d want to keep going all day long!) Other times, depending on the extent of his anger, he will cry, talk or hug.
Although he loves to draw, it’d never work for him during the peak of his anger. However, it does help him to draw when he’s calm, as he sometimes will reflect on his past feelings, talk about them and make sense of them. I’m sure there are many more wonderful ideas, so if you have any to share, I’d love to hear them.
If you have a child who loves to paint, but is looking for something a bit different to simply using a paintbrush, they will love this. It’s the weekend here, and Missy 2 was once again begging to paint. Missy 10′s been away at school when the little ones have been painting, so it was nice for her to get the chance to join in.
So, how did we paint with balls? I got a big plastic box, and Blu-tacked some paper to the bottom of the inside.
I sat each ball in a different bowl or container for separate colours. Then, the kids just picked up a slippery ball, dropped it onto their paper, and moved the box to make the balls roll.
Kids have so much fun with this activity and learn a lot without realising it. They get to:
- work their fine motor muscles, trying extra hard to pick up those slippery balls
- experiment with gravity and physics, tipping the box this way and that to make the ball go where they want it to on the page
- challenge their eye-hand co-ordination in a more intense way than usual. It’s one thing to try to watch something, and get your hands to work together with your vision, but imagine trying to do that when the ball has a mind of its own!
- learn about colours mixing together, as one coloured ball rolls over previous stripes painted by other colours.
- apply trial and error to see what happens if they use smaller balls, such as marbles (for the over 3′s, of course we have to be vigilant about choking risks), tennis balls, or even basketballs.
- learn about cause and effect: what happens if we use a four-sided container? What about a round container? The child will observe one is more likely to give stripes and criss-crossing lines, the other will give more rounded, spiral shapes.
One thing I’ve never gotten around to trying though, when doing this activity is painting with a football! If anyone’s child ever gives that go, let me know how it went.
I’ve talked before about the importance of encouraging our children to discuss feelings.
I’ve made some very simple felt pieces to attach to circular faces which have been stuck to the fridge. Our little ones can have fun rearranging the the facial features into different emotions. This is an effective way for children to learn about self expression, reading the body language of others, and having empathy for others.
This is a language rich activity to also help children discuss colours, label facial features, but most of all, to give words to their feelings and become familiar with using them.
It’s handy to have little circles of felt for this purpose, especially for those times when a big felt board is not handy. I think it’d also look great on a child’s bedroom wall.
‘Please Mum, I do painting?’ is the plea I hear from Missy 2 on a regular basis lately. She talks about it all day long. She just adores it.
So, my partner and my son went out to run some errands, and Missy 10 was off at school. This left just Missy 2 and I for some Mum and daughter time. Bliss.
I decided to let her engage in some string painting.
This couldn’t have been simpler to set up. I just tied some lengths of string to clothes pegs then let her dip it in the paint, and squiggle it across the paper.
What I love about this activity is that there cannot be any pressure on the child to make the painting ‘look like’ something. Regular readers will know that open ended art/craft/play in general is something I like to get on the soap box about!
Hands up who thinks she’s enjoying herself?
Missy 2, much in the adventurous spirit of any toddler, got all experimental after a little while. This is cool, don’t try to fight it… Even though an activity has been set up in one way, it’s great if it ends up evolving into something else entirely. Our children need to explore the paint, the paper, their hands, textures, concepts, and so on. Just roll with it.
See how she just immerses herself further and further into the experience? What have your children painted lately?
As you can see, I’ve shown where I usually write the child’s name and date (I didn’t put my child’s actual name for privacy reasons). Labelling artwork in this way reinforces name recognition, and writing it on the left side mimicks the pattern in which we typically read and write. I like to add the date for sentimental reasons, but it could easily be left off.
No, you’re not seeing things! He, who hates messy play. He, who wouldn’t touch the fingerpaint or spaghetti paint, has busted out of his comfort zone, gotten paint on his hands and enjoyed it!
This wasn’t the plan, but of course I’m not complaining at all.
It all started with a humble sponge and a string bag from a bag of oranges.
I wrapped it tightly around the sponge with some string…
And we had mesh dab printing, ready to go!
Don’t stress, it’s an old plate…
Printing is a marvelous way for children to apply trial and error to their painting. They learn via cause and effect what will happen if they use something patterned such as a mesh-covered sponge to print onto paper.
It’s a nice, ‘safe’ way to get a child who doesn’t like mess on their hands to have a try at using paint. As Mr 4 has shown us, sometimes all it takes is the need to feel comfortable first, then it’s time to dive in. I think it also helped that his little sister was already using the paint for hand prints anyway, so he felt happy to try what she was doing.
How does your child feel about messy play? Do they love it, or does it bother them?
Time for some messy play again! This time, I have mixed cooked spaghetti with fingerpaint for some squishy, slimey, squoozy fun.
(If you’d like a printout of the fingerpaint recipe, you can download it along with recipes for cooked and uncooked playdough.)
Spaghetti paint is great because it doesn’t cost much and uses ingredients most people usually have in their pantry. It is an excellent activity for sensory exploration. Children can enjoy the smell, the slimy feeling, talk about if it is warm or cold and how wet it is.
It encourages much social and language interaction between children and adults alike. Children can experiment with the paint by either handling it on its own or smearing it around on a piece of paper.
Don’t worry if the paper gets holes in it, always remember that children care about and need the process, not the product.
You can see in the photo above how a child could find out what the paint looks like if they lift the spaghetti off the paper – beautiful swirls!
Mr 4 isn’t a huge fan of messy play, but he liked watching this activity, which is a big improvement. Missy 2, however was willing to have a try. If only Missy 10 were home to really get up to her armpits in this mess. In fact, I think I’ll have to let her when she gets home from school.
(Note: if you are considering using this in a preschool or a daycare setting, please be sensitive to the fact that food play is offensive to some cultures. When in doubt, check first.)
What messy things have your children been up to lately?
3. Encourage your child to talk to other children and adults.
4. Give them opportunities to listen. A great example is listening to a recorded story.
5. Dramatic play – eg, dressing up, puppet play, etc.
6. Talk about feelings. This can make it easier for your child to put sad or angry feelings into words as they arise.
7. Encourage your child to draw and talk about what they are doing.
8. Go sightseeing. Your child will be full of questions! It’s also a great way for children to name the things they see.
9. Sing and dance to music. Talk about your movements: shaking, twisting, wobbling, going faster, going slow, stop, go! Talk about the music: is it quiet or loud? Happy, sad, angry music? You get the idea.
We did this activity last weekend, and I’ve been too flat out to show you until now! I filled four water spray bottles with water and food colouring to make a pretty water colour for the kids.
We took it outside to spray on paper on the ground. This is even more fun if you can hang gigantic pieces of paper over the fence, but we didn’t want to get our front fence stained, and going out the back to do it on an old fence isn’t an option at the moment. Never mind.
Mr 4 and Missy 2 had a ball squirting away with their bottles. Here’s Missy 2 using both hands to squeeze the trigger and watching the mist shoot over the page. Spray painting is:
- cheap
- open-ended
- strengthening for the fine motor muscles (hands)
- requires eye-hand co-ordination as the child watches the direction of the spray and tries to manipulate it where they want it to go.
- great for teaching children about colours
- gives the child a chance to use trial and error
We tried spraying over ourselves:
Then we turned to nature:
And we learnt what happens when part of the page is covered then painted!
One day we’ll do this with the paper upright against the fence, and I’ll show how much fun that is, too. Are you all having a lovely weekend? I hope so!
Edited to add: we did this again later down the track with a sheet hung over the back gate.
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):
