Connecting Babies, Music, Learning, & Fun: Village Home Materials – The Books, Art Banners, & Manipulatives

Your Feathers book is a door into the world of conversation. Your infant may not speak to you in words, but they will point. So, the Feathers book with its simple, beautifully colored paintings allows you to ask simple questions and get a pointed response from your child. “Where is the bird’s eye? Where is your eye? Where is mommy’s eye?”

These questions, lay the foundation of self-identity as well teaching your child what an eye is and where it is located and how conversations work. There is just one word of text per page, but let that one word be a gateway to the art and the experience you and your child can have with the illustrations.

I love the book from Do Si Do! It is one of my favorite Village books. This Is My Dance is filled with rhyming, rhythmic language. It is filled with movement patterns to re-create with your child as you chant the book. It is all about words and connecting meaning to a particular word. Your child will learn what “swoopy” means as you read the book and she sees the swooping baby bear, and then she’ll feel the swooping as you chant the page, and swoop her through the room.

The refrain adds an element of repetition that all children love. The combination of new information on each page and the repeated refrain is the ideal learning combination for your young children, a balance of old and new.

The art banners are the easiest things you get. Simply hang them somewhere where your child can see them: above the changing table, behind the bars on the crib, at child’s eye level in the room where they play, on the lower cabinet doors or drawer fronts in your kitchen, anywhere in the house that you think the child would delight in seeing them. Laminating them preserves them, and allows you use them longer, and move them more often. You can cut them into sections and mix and match them. This works especially well if you want to put them in the kitchen. Blue painters tape will hold them up and not ruin the surface you are adhering them to. By the way, your child will enjoy the art banners more if you read the books often!

-posted by Miss Allison, who was going to write about the manipulatives: your chime ball, scarf, and egg shaker. But, somehow she thinks you know what to do with those. After all, you do come to class!