These ideas in the Games for Babies Series can be played with babies 9 months and up, but my children play these well into their preschool years.
Croquet
What you’ll need:
Ping pong balls
Wooden spoons
In its simplest form, you use the wooden spoons to play a “free-form” version of croquet all around the living room. With little ones, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination just to hit the ball!
You can also sit facing your child (with legs spread to contain runaway balls), and hit the ping pong ball back and forth between you.
As your child gets older, create a little “wicket” course with blocks or books or boxes. Have fun with it!
Chicken Ball
What you’ll need:
Feather dusters
Balloons
I have to give credit for the invention of this game to my nephew, Jared. Blow up a balloon (or two), and hit the balloon with the feather duster. Sound silly? It is. But unbelievably fun.
For older ones, place a making tape line on the floor and play with the classic rule, “Don’t let the balloon touch down on your own side”.
-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose own children and their cousins launched rocket balloons over the loft balcony attempting to land them in the growup’s coffee cups this weekend at Grandma and Poppa’s beach house. (Another fun game, but not for babies!)
The word “discrimination” tends to get a bad rap. It’s actually a very important skill. Especially when it comes to your sense of hearing. For instance, I don’t want to open my front door, call my children by name in to dinner, and have all the neighborhood kids appear. (Well, that might be a compliment to my culinary skills, but that’s not the point.)
Here are some fun and easy activities for you do with your child to help develop auditory discrimination:
Infants (newborn to around 18 months):
You’ll do most of the work at this age. Point out the noises around you. Sounds have to be alone, rather than layered or mixed in with others. When more than one sound occurs simultaneously, infants cannot discriminate between them, even if they are very different noises.
Say, “Listen. That is a dog barking.” Then, you imitate the dog. “Woof. Woof. A dog says, ‘woof, woof’”. Eventually, your baby will hear a dog barking and say, “Dog.”
Ask and answer your own question. “What sound does a truck make? A truck goes ‘vroom, vroom.’” One day in the future when your little one is playing with a truck, you’ll hear “vroom, vroom”, emanating from her mouth.
In this stage, your baby is learning to associate a particular sound with a particular object. Later, he’ll use this skill to match a sound to a letter symbol.
Note: When you speak in full sentences to your baby, you’ll be demonstrating vocabulary, good grammar, and correct sentence structure. What you put in her mind will, at some point, come out naturally!
Toddlers (18 months to 3 years): As toddlers, children continue to discriminate single sounds best. You’ll still need to name new sounds, but now they will readily imitate them back to you. Toddlers are also likely to ask what an unidentified sound is.
You can ask questions like, “What is making that sound?” (a cow) “Can you moo like a cow?” “What does a _______ say?”
Toddlers can now associate sound with a process or event. “What’s that sound? … Yes, someone is knocking on the door. What does that mean?”… You are right. Grandma is here!” Also, think microwave beeping, clothes drying timer sounding, keys rattling in the lock, phone ringing.
Save the learning of letter sounds for later. And letter names have nothing to do with reading. Auditory discrimination is the best first step towards reading readiness.
Preschoolers (3 to 6 years):
At 3 and 4, preschoolers are now ready for simple layered sounds. That is, identifying a sound (like a lawnmower, and then hearing a bus drive past), and being able to recognize the sound of the bus while the lawnmower is still making noise.
Focus now on picking out sounds. Make a game of it. Let’s say you are taking a trip to the beach. What are the things that you, the grownup can hear? Birds, waves, people talking, laughing, a ferry boat… Have your child identify a sound. He picks laughing. You listen for it, too. Now you say, “Can you also hear the waves?” He has to use his filters – turn off his ears to laughing, and listen for the waves. That is auditory discrimination.
For 4 ½ and up, I love the Kindermusik CD called Ned Redd, World Traveler. Every song on the CD is from a different country, and the narrator at the beginning of each track will give you a choice of three different sounds to listen for, and how many times each sound occurs. There are three different “levels”, so younger and older kids (and their grownups!) can play together.
Here’s a track from Ned Redd so you can play this game right now.
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If you’d like to download the whole album (great for a car trip!), you can right here on play.kindermusik.com.
-posted by Miss Analiisa, who developed her auditory discrimination skills by practicing band music on her euphonium in the woods at music camp right next to her violin-playing friend Gwen, while blocking out Gwen rehearsing orchestra music. I am told that it sounded rather horrible to the non-discriminating!
I was privileged to witness a most wonderful thing today. It happened in an Our Time class. We were playing a word game. Games that are about word play and give the kids the opportunity to fill in the blank can be very dangerous- you just never know what is going to come out of a little ones mouth.
For instance, once in an Imagine That class a student shouted out that his favorite movie was “Hell Boy”. I’m not even sure now what we were talking about that triggered this bit of sharing, but his mother was horrified- after we all got done laughing, that is. (By the way, the only bad thing about the movie is the title.)
But that door swings both ways and occasionally something marvelous walks through. Today was one of those days.
So we’ve been playing the word game with “There’s a Little Wheel a’ Turning In My Heart”. (I just wrote a blog about this game, so you can do a search and find out how we play it….) We’d played it twice already in this class and had some pretty fabulous things inside our hearts.
The typical things are dinosaurs roaring, and balls bouncing, but this class was on an unusual roll. We had a lovey blanket hiding and a horse making that snorting/blowing sound (Now that was funny – 15 grown-ups singing and then vibrating their lips like a horse…) I asked for one more thing so we could finish up and move on to bouncing.
Imi and Allie
But it was taking a long time so I asked one of my older students, she’s three or so, and comes to class with her little sister. “Allie,” I said, “What’s in your heart? What do you love best?” And she answered in a clear strong voice, (such a sweet little voice), “My sister, Imi, is in my heart”.
There was silence for about 3 seconds, which is a long time, really. Then every grown up in the room spontaneously said “OHHHHHHHH!” I looked up and several moms had tears glistening in their eyes. I did. I was suddenly reminded of how much I love my own sister, how much I miss her. Denver is so far away.
However, we had a task at hand, and I couldn’t leave Ali hanging, waiting to finish her song, even though every heartstring in the room was stretched taut. So I asked “Allie, what’s she doing in your heart?” She answered quickly without hestitation. She already knew what she was going to say. “Imi is playing with me in my heart.” Their Mom was crying, and everyone else was sniffling, including me, but we all bravely swung our mallets, rang our bars and sang Ali’s beautiful verse….
Imi’s playing with Allie in her heart, in her heart, Imi’s playing with Allie in her heart. In her heart, in her heart, Imi’s playing with Allie in her heart.
I’ve been thinking about my sister all day- and what a gift she is in my life. I’ve choked back tears several times just thinking of how blessed I am to have a sister that is also my dear friend. Thanks Allie, for reminding me that I should tell her more often how wonderful she is. I sent her an email earlier today.
-posted by Miss Allison, who says that this is one of those days I’ll never forget. It’s one of the days that makes teaching the very best job that could possibly exist. Thanks again, Allie.
Babies aren’t born with the ability to accurately and smoothly direct their eye movements; it’s something they learn over time. Eventually, good visual tracking skills allow us to follow a line of print without losing our place.
My son Rob had poor visual tracking, and we ended up seeing a behavioral ophthalmologist and doing “eye exercises” every day. At first, he had to hold a bookmark under each line of his reading books, so that his eyes wouldn’t jump to the next line accidentally. As his tracking improved, he could read without the marker.
Here’s a fun game to play with your baby to assist with developing visual tracking skills:
Take your baby and a flashlight into a dark room. (At night before bed is a natural time, and this activity is very relaxing.)
Lie down on your backs. Shine the flashlight slowly around the walls and ceiling and encourage your little one to track the light. Point to the moving light. “Can you see the light? Where is it going?”
Turn on some favorite music. Move the light with the tempo – faster or slower as it changes, or “long” or “short” to match the music.
Sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Turn the flashlight on and off with the words “twinkle, twinkle”. For the rest of the lines, leave the light on as you move it around the walls and ceiling as before.
I will warn you, however, that as your baby gets older, he or she may demand a flashlight to play with, too, and that’s okay!
-posted by Miss Analiisa, who knows that toddlers and preschoolers love this game as well.
I love “All Fall Down” from Away We Go ”. But we’ll do it in just about every class level. From a learning perspective, it works for all age groups. And I love it because it is just plain fun.
On the off chance that you’ve never experienced the joy of playing “All Fall Down”, let me fill in the blanks a bit. There are rules that everyone follows, so that makes it a game. Everyone gets a streamer. Parents, too. And there is music (naturally).
The music has three cues, and each cue requires a specific reaction from the players (these are the rules):
To start, everyone lies on the floor.
When you hear the crank, you get up.
When you hear the music, you dance.
When you hear the descending scale, you fall down.
Repeat until the music is over.
Then repeat again and again and again, until everyone is tired. You’ll be physically tired before your child is tired of the game.
Why? Because they love this game. Here are some of the reasons I think they love it so much and will play it over and over again.
Reason One: The need to move is so powerful in the early years that any game or activity that encourages movement is going to be a hit. This particular game inspires total abandonment to movement- it is all about movement. Fast movement, slow movement, moving just your arms as the streamers fly all around you, smooth movements and jerky movements- it just doesn’t matter so long as you are moving. No one feels like this game is too hard. No one feels like this game is too easy. So the success rate is 100%.
Reason Two: This game allows young children to address one of their bigger fears as new movers and walkers – falling down. Have you ever seen a child take a tumble, pop right back up, obviously unharmed, burst into tears and dash into mom’s or dad’s arms? They do that, not necessarily because they got hurt, but because the fall scared them.
A game where falling down is the ultimate goal is a great way to alleviate this fear. The children are in control of the falling; they learn that they can get back up again, that their brain is in control of their body throughout its range of motion. Learning to fall down helps to put the child in control of their body.
Reason Three: The game has a surprising intellectual element. There are no language cues that signal what to do. The child simply learns to recognize the sound of the descending scale pattern and understand that means it’s time to fall down.
Initially, they learn by watching the grownups. I am quite sure they learn the musical cue, because after three weeks of playing “All Fall Down” in class the children are now anticipating it; they know when it’s coming and get ready. A pre-schooler in “Imagine That!” dashed by me today and said “It’s coming Miss Allison!!!” and she was dead on. (She was thrilled to be right- such success!) And they know how long they need to lie on the floor (it’s different each time) and they don’t move until they hear that crank. Which is connected to…
Reason Four: This game teaches self-control – how to wait, how to follow instructions, how to share the space with a dozen other moving bodies and not crash into them. It teaches deliberate listening and deliberate action. It is a game that is full of purpose.
It is so full of purpose that it’s easy to forget the original intent of the activity is to teach the musical concepts of high and low. And it does that beautifully as well.
-posted by Miss Allison, who wants you to head into the living room and clear the furniture and enjoy a few moments of unconstrained, falling down joy.
For those of you who don’t own “All Fall Down” in your music library, you can download it right here.
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