Ideas, Continued, from Your Child At Play: Three to Five Years

Here are some more ideas I want to keep in mind for Xander and then Nick when Nick is old enough:

• Show him a family album. Can he find pictures of his mom or dad when they were both babies?
• Show him a dead ant. How does he know the ant is dead? What could have happened?
• Read him a book about death, like Freddie the Leaf by Leo Buscaglia, or if someone in his life has died, Someone Special Died by Joan Singleton.
• Play the Follow the Leader with him, taking turns at being leader.
• On a breezy day, play bubbles with him and challenge him to catch a bubble as it flies through the air.
• Make a skipping rope out of running water from a hose. Hold the hose low to begin with and gradually make it higher.
• Turn a walk into a scavenger hunt. Give him a basket and see if he can collect five or six different objects: a big and small stone, a flower petal, an acorn or pine cone, a piece of paper, a maple leaf, and/or a pine needle. Keep a list of what you are looking for, and cross out each item as you find it.
• Play "Simon Says," taking turns being Simon.
• With other kids: Punchinello, a circle game where every kid gets a chance to be in the middle and perform an action the other kids imitate. "What can you do, Punchinello, funny fellow? What can you do, Punchinello, funny you? (Child does trick.) We can do it too, Punchinello, funny fellow. We can do it too, Punchinello, funny you! (Others imitate child)"
• Go to a petting zoo.
• Do activities to feel soft things, rough things, slippery things, and prickly things.
• Expose him to a second language (for example, speak and use Spanish for half the day).
• Tear a piece of paper in half. Give your child a roll of tape so that he can put the two halves back together.
• Take him to the supermarket. See if he can help me find the different vegetables and fruits on my list.
• Read up on several different types of animals from your zoo or even more specifically, from the petting zoo in your zoo or the aviary in the zoo. Go see those animals. Take pictures of them. When you look at the pictures together, talk about them.
• Play Hangman.
• Roll out Play-Doh and let him cut out letters and numbers from it.
• Work with him to make a scrapbook of his golden birthday. Have him dictate captions for the photos.
• Write a letter or postcard to our child and mail it. He will love getting real mail!
• Encourage him to help me find the right phone number in my cell phone when we are making a call to a friend or relative.
• Enlarge the type on a word processing program and let him type "words". He may like to use different colors of type, too. Print them out if he wants.
• Introduce him to email. To send email to him, use my account and write "for Xander" as the subject and mail it to my account. Help him open and read it.
• Model friendship skills for him. When we invite friends to the house, talk with him about the sorts of things we can do to make them feel welcome.
• When a friend is invited over, give the children an opportunity to make their own snacks.
• Before going on an outing, act out the trip with him. Then replay the trip when we get back.
• Set up a fully-stocked play kitchen in one room for a week or two.
• Let him finger-paint again.

Awesome book, right? Even though I come across lots of ideas that are simple, valuable, and common-sense, I can't seem to come up with them on my own. 

Ideas from Your Child At Play: Three to Five Years, Part One

I got this great book from the library based on someone's recommendation: Your Child At Play: Three to Five Years, by Marilyn Segal, Ph.D. I want to list some of the ideas that would work well for Xander so I have a better chance of actually doing them.

Section 1: Playing With Ideas

1. Watch movies or shows about faraway places. A show like Sesame Street may have segments on other cultures, or a documentary or nature show. (Our kids have really enjoyed the animal, plant, and music segments of Wonder Pets, Little Einsteins, Dora the Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!, and Sesame Street.)

2. When you see a plane flying overhead, talk about the direction it's heading and where it might be going. Show an aerial photo of where we live.

3. Go to a museum exhibit about China or another culture (maybe for Chinese New Year).

4. Packing for a trip: Together choose clothes according to the climate where you're going and the activities you'll be doing. You can even pack for an imaginary trip, like for a mountain-climbing expedition.

5. While he watches, draw a map from our front door to the bedroom. Walk along the path with him and let him find the lines on the paper that relate to the walk he is taking.

6. Go through family photo albums together and talk about trips we went on, things we did, and holidays we celebrated.

7. After a holiday is over, talk about the next one coming up and how it will be different. Preschool children may think that the next holiday will be similar; e.g., will wonder what costume he will wear at Christmas.

8. At the end of the day, talk to him about what he did. Help him remember details. Ask him to guess what is going to happen tomorrow.

9. Create a weekly calendar out of train shapes for each day of the week and glue magnets to the backs. Let him add a new car to the refrigerator every day until he has completed the week. (I may make a train shape to stick to the Spanish calendar I made as we talk about what day it is in Spanish.)

10. This is not a preschool idea, but I found it fascinating. The book says that a child who has just learned to walk will step on a stone but walk around a turtle.

11. If someone close to him dies, do not talk about it as being like going to sleep. That can make children afraid to go to sleep. Instead, emphasize that a dead person does not hurt in any way.

12. Talk about the similarities and differences we have with animals. What would it be like to be hatched out of an egg, to live in a nest until one day you started to fly? You could fly over fences, streets, rivers, wherever you wanted. You'd have to sleep in a tree and eat worms. You would have to make sure a cat didn't catch you and eat you for dinner.

(This goes up to p. 52.)

Note to self: Also re-read the Mister Rogers book on play that Mom gave me. He has similar suggestions.