Toddlers Love Colour: Colourful Craft and Reading

Like many toddlers my two two year-olds are a bit obsessed with colours. I have been posting recently about how I am trying to structure our craft and other activities around the books we are reading - so with that in mind this week we have been reading books about colours and doing some colourful craft to go with it!

My kids love the Elmer books and "Elmer's Colours" in particular. The Elmer series are simple books about a colourful Elephant called Elmer. I think my toddlers are drawn to the colourful pictures and find the stories nice and easy to follow.

We have also been reading this beautiful book by Alison Jay, "If Kisses Were Colours".  It's true I may possibly love it more then my little ones do! I find it beautifully poetic and the illustrations are enchanting and amazing. The text and illustrations together make this book a real little treasure and another one to add to the list of books to give as a gift when a new baby is born.

One of the colourful craft activities we did this week was paper towel butterflies. All you need is food colouring, paper towel, cotton tips and pipe cleaners. Put a couple of drops on food colouring in a shallow dish of water. Use cotton tips to dab the watercolour onto the paper towel. Leave to dry. When the paper towel is dry use half a pipe cleaner to fasten into the shape of a butter fly and your done! 

Such a simple activity, not too much mess and uses most of the things you probably already have around the house. You can attach the butterflies to longer pipe cleaners to flutter them around, hang from string to make a mobile, or stick on a coloured background. 

Who's Hiding?

Here's another great book to add to the list of books I have reviewed that I have found to be truly engaging and interactive for toddlers. It is called "Who's Hiding?" and it is written and illustrated by Satoru Onishi.

There are 18 cute, bright and colourful creatures presented on each double page of this book. On the first page you are introduced to each animal and on each page after that the reader is asked to find particular creatures. For example: Who's hiding? Who's crying? Who has horns? Who is angry? Who is backwards?

These questions really draw the young reader in and engage them in the book. The questions and the slight changes to the pictures make for a very interactive reading session. There is no storyline (in the traditional sense) but this makes it perfect for the very young. It also means that it does not need to be read in it's entirety, so it's a great book for the youngest readers with the shortest attention spans.

I love the colour, interactivity, and simplicity of this book. I also think it is a great way to teach and reinforce some simple early mathematical language and concepts (like 'Who is backwards?) and how we can tell emotions (Who is angry? Who is crying?)

In my own day-to-day life with my kids at the moment I am really trying to use the books we are reading to be the basis of some of the other activities in our day. So today I used this book to do a simple little craft activity and we made one of the creatures from the Who's Hiding? book (I chose the bunny as it looked the simplest!). It was a good old toilet paper roll craft! We covered the toilet roll with blue paper. I cut out some ears and got some googly eyes and the girls glued them on. The girls loved making these and once they had made them they did some imaginative play with them and also used them to act out different pages in the book.

Toddlerobics

Toddlerobics is a book by Zita Newcome and it is a great book to engage little bookworms and to get them moving. As I have often written in previous blogs, reading for littlies is all about engagement and getting them involved in books. Reading doesn't have to be a passive experience.
This book is a great one to read to toddlers on a rainy day or a day when the kids have been inside and need a bit of physical activity.

It is a simple rhyming story - perfect to help with early literacy. It is full of short and simple directions for toddlers to follow.

Toddlers love the bright coloured pictures of other toddlers. My toddlers love pointing out all the things the characters are doing and wearing, and also like telling some of them to "share", and are often pointing out who is "being very good" and who is "a bit naughty". But most of all they love following the instructions in the book; zooming around like planes, crawling like a cat, flapping arms, bumping bottoms, stretching, shaking...it's quite a workout!

It's great fun to read and even more fun seeing toddlers do the actions themselves.

There are lots of great books to get little ones moving. This is one of my favourites. I would love to hear what books you read to your little bookworms that get them moving!

Baby-led Weaning

My kids are pretty good eaters. They are getting a little more fussy as they are getting older but from the age of 5 months, when they started on solids, to 2 years they were incredible eaters and it made my job as a mum so much easier.  I think we have been pretty lucky with them that they do eat a wide range of food and perhaps it is just luck but I put it down to a book I read on advice from a Mothercraft Nurse that we used a few times in the first year of the twins lives. The book is called “Baby-led Weaning” and it is written by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett.

The main idea of the concept is that from 6 months on children can be given appropriate finger food that they can feed themselves and that they do not need to be given pureed, spoon-fed food.  The idea is from 6 months old the child is part of family mealtime, they can eat most of the same food that the rest of the family is eating, and they feed themselves.

Baby-led weaning:

*  allows babies to explore taste, texture, colour and smell

*  encourages independence and confidence

*  helps to develop their hand-eye coordination and chewing skills

*  makes picky eating and mealtime battles less likely

(Taken from the website http://www.rapleyweaning.com)

I had started giving my twins solids (in the form of puree’s) at 5 months so by the time they were 6 months old this appealed to me for a number of reasons.

•       It meant that I didn’t have to puree, freeze, etc anymore and that I could pretty much just cook one meal that we would all be able to eat.
•       My husband and I eat with the kids at 5pm anyway so it made sense to be all eating together and eating the same thing.
•       My girls were starting to want to feed themselves and weren’t happy being spoonfed.

     As another bonus it has also been suggested that allowing a child to feed themselves from a young age and offering finger food promotes development of the muscles of the mouth, which may help a child with their speech development.

It’s quite a jump to go from pureeing and spoon feeding to finger food and giving your 6-month-old total control of feeding themselves, and it is a very messy experience. I can completely see why people wouldn’t want to do it. This might be one of those rare times when not being a neat freak worked in my favour.

You may be thinking that the meals that both babies and adults can eat must be pretty limited but there are some great cookbooks out there with plenty of ideas, including The Baby-led Weaning Cookbook.

I may sound like I work for the authors of Baby-led Weaning but I don’t! I just found that this worked for me. My kids started to enjoy eating and are generally not fussy eaters. One of my twins will eat anything (and that may be genetic from her father), the other has become a little more fussy as a toddler.

When she started getting fussy and was sometimes refusing dinner I trawled through a variety of toddler parenting books and discovered some good pieces of advice. One of the best things to remember is not to get too caught up in it. Meals should not be a stressful time for you or your child.  You really can’t force a child to eat. All you can do is offer a variety of healthy food throughout the day. A child’s appetite (just like an adults) goes up and down. I would strongly advise against offering your toddler different meals in one sitting until you find something they like. I would suggest giving them their entire meal (whatever you plan for them to eat, including any fruit or yoghurt) at the start of the meal time and letting them go for it. Make it clear that that is what they are getting to eat and that if they don't want it there aren't any other options. Otherwise they will constantly be waiting for something better, and you won't get to relax and enjoy mealtimes either. You don't have to eat at the same time as your child/ren if it doesn't suit but try sitting down and chatting over dinner no matter how old your kids are. 

Mealtimes should be a happy time and hopefully some of this advice will help make mealtimes fun (albeit a bit messy) at your place too!

On the Farm

It's been school holidays here for the past two weeks and although we've had a flu-ey house for nearly the whole time we did manage a great getaway to a farm. We stayed in a cottage attached to an operating dairy farm so every afternoon we went and collected the eggs, fed and played with the animals and watched the cows being milked. We had an amazing time!
Since coming back I have pulled out a farm book we have at home. It is amazing how a book can hold so much more value after a child has had an experience that relates to the book. Before we had been to the farm the girls still liked this book but now that they've spent some quality time on a real farm they are so much more into this book and their level of interaction with the book and the discussion that it generates is far greater.

The book is "Cockadoodle Doo! Farmyard Hullabaloo" by Giles Andreae and David Wojtowycz. It features short little poems about the many different animals you find on a farm and beautiful bright illustrations. I have found this book a great way of keeping alive the experiences we had during our farm stay and continuing the discussions and learning.
Today I also did a simple craft activity with my two little farm girls. As it was a dairy farm we went to the girls are right into cows so I drew some big pictures of a cow and cut out some black paper which the girls glued on to make the cows spotty. Very simple but lots of fun!

Linking up with the Weekly Kid's Co-op via Triple-T Mum.


PS - How cute is this photo of two of the cow's kissing!

Engaging Reading: Act it Out

I have been thinking a lot lately about what really makes kids love reading from an early age and to me it is all about them seeing books as fun and playful. For kids reading is not usually a passive, quiet activity (although there is a place for that too). It should be something that they are actively engaged in. Even during quiet, before-bed-reading, the child can still be actively engaged by quiet questioning by the adult and participation in the story telling.

One of the best ways to engage young pre-readers in reading is to encourage them to act out the story. This doesn’t take much preparation or planning on the adult’s part. The other day when my two year olds were playing and I was busy trying to tidy up the toys while they were busy seeing how many boxes of toys they could empty (that’s a game we play often but I never seem to win!) I found this little mouse finger puppet and it reminded me of the mouse in one of the books on our bookshelf. I got the book out and discovered that we had plenty of toys around the house to act out the whole story.

The book “Shhh! Little Mouse” by Pamela Allen is all about a little mouse that tiptoes around the house eating a variety of food before accidentally knocking over a glass and waking the cat. It is a great book for young kids as it has very simple language, not many words and some pages are just pictures.

We got out all our pretend food and my little girls turned the pages one at a time and told the entire story using the mouse finger puppet and the food. One of them then started being the cat and crawled around the house meowing so I couldn’t capture her in photos but in their own ways they were both really engaged in the story and were developing great pre-reading skills. They could retell the story themselves, use the pictures to make meaning, and sequence the events.

This is a simple activity that you can do with toys and items you already have around the house. For older kids you can always get them to make their own puppets and put on their own puppet show. For even older kids it is also a great way to encourage reluctant writers to write their own scripts and perform them. 

As I’m sure many teachers will tell you, sometimes the simplest ideas and most spontaneous learning experiences are often best!

This was written as a guest post on the amazing blog Playdough to Plato 

Thank you to the wonderful Malia for asking me to guest post on her fabulous blog!

Also linking up with the weekly kids co-op via Triple-T Mum

Worth Waiting For

A friend of mine posted these wise words on her facebook page a while back and it is so true.
As you may know from previous posts my two little girls were a long time in the making! My husband and I tried everything to conceive for nearly 5 years. Our infertility could not be explained, my husband and I had every test available and no reason could be found for our inability to conceive. We had reached a point where it looked like we had exhausted all avenues for having a child of our own and doctors were telling us that it was time to move on and look at other options when it finally happened for us. The time of my life that I was trying to conceive was the hardest I've ever been through. I know people go through worse and we are so lucky to have got there in the end but it was so tough and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.


To me my twins are perfect, but they are ordinary 2-year-olds, sometimes very high maintenance and definitely not perfectly behaved. I think they are so clever, but they are not the most advanced. I love being a Mum, but I get tired, cranky, and often feel like there is so much more I could be doing for them or with them. This blog is not about how great they are or how great I am. I often worry that that may be how it seems. That is not the intention.

The reason I don't focus on the struggles or difficulties lies in the rule that I shared at the beginning of this post. You see, when I was struggling to fall pregnant I used to listen to so many people complaining about the difficulties of parenthood. Lack of sleep, crying, not having freedom, tantrums, how difficult it is being pregnant, how awful giving birth is... the lists that people had were often mammoth. All I could think of when I heard such conversations was "I would do anything to be able to experience what they are complaining about". I made a promise that if pregnancy, birth and motherhood ever happened for me I wouldn't complain about any of the hassles that go along with those things. It is such a luxury to have such 'complaints', they are actually blessings. Now that I am a Mum I know that it is so easy to get caught up in how hard some parts of being a Mum are, and truly no-one can ever explain to you just how f@#$ing hard it really is, and I also understand that people don't mean it as complaining. For me I just think that this is what I wished for for so many years and every part of it is what I fought so long and hard for. SO - I need to get on with it and enjoy every moment, as it really is a privellege to be a Mum to healthy children.