Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Tuesday
Baby game to play: Row, Row, Row your boat
The HOW and Why of playing this traditional song as a game with your baby.
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Life is but a dream.
AGE: From when your baby is 4 months
old.
Monday
Peek a boo
1.You can play it in four different ways:
- Hide your face behind your fingers, move your hands and say PEEK A BOO! (as in picture)
Finding faces
 |
| A mother gazes at her newborn infant |
ACTIVITY: Looking at your baby's face, looking into baby's eyes and making animated expressions and smiling.
This is a simple activity that can be done anytime and there is a lot of science backing up the reasons why it is an important daily activity with your baby.
Babies are born with a remarkable ability that helps them identify faces. In experiments, newborn infants have shown preference for looking at faces over other visual stimuli ( Batki et al 2000). They also prefer faces with open eyes and happy faces over frowning ones. (Farroni et al 2007). Eye contact is an important signal in interactions with other people and successful communication depends on the ability to detect the intention to communicate (Frith 2007).
When your baby sees you smile, it releases chemicals in her body. This makes her feel good – and the chemicals also help babies brain grow.
See a diagram explaining the science behind this.
Parents' faces entertains baby and actually make baby feel more secure and safe. (Study at University of Delaware USA)
So this activity is important because it:
- creates and nurtures the bond between parent and child
- helps baby feel secure and safe
- helps baby develop and learn about the world
- helps develop communication skills
PHOTO CREDIT: Portrait of Zenon Thomas O'Donnell and his mother taken by Dylan O'Donnell
SCIENTIFIC SOURCES:
Batki A, Baron-Cohen S, Wheelwright S, Connellan J, Ahluwalia J. Is there an innate gaze module? Evidence from human neonates.
Farroni T, Mansfield E.M, Lai C, Johnson M.H. Infants perceiving and acting on the eyes: tests of an evolutionary hypothesis.
Farroni T, Johnson M.H, Menon E, Zulian L, Faraguna D, Csibra G. Newborn's preference for face-relevant stimuli: effects of contrast polarity. Frith C.D. The social brain? Frith C.D, Frith U. Social cognition in humans.
Friday
B is for Ball: the best baby toy you can buy
I say balls are the best baby toy you can buy as I really love "toys" for baby that you do not need to buy. (That's another story) But every baby should have at least 1 ball.
ACTIVITY: Offer your baby a ball to explore - touch, taste and look at. Watch it roll. Encourage her to see what else she can do with it.
This will eventually help her learn to roll it, drop it in a box, and take it out again.
EXTENSION: Try balls with different shapes and textures (bumpy, "kooshy", squishy etc.)
Balls are the best toys.
Why? Because they
- move
- can be manipulated and moved in a variety of ways
- they make baby start to think about cause and affect
- they can be played with alone or with a friend
DEVELOPMENT: Balls for babies stimulates:
- sense of touch as they feel the ball
- vision as they watch the ball roll
- eyes and hands working together as they try to reach and grab the ball
- thinking as they try and work it out
You don't need a lot of toys for your baby but if you need to purchase something, maybe a gift for a child's friend, please consider buying it from my store, where you will find 5 different balls and some other educational toys. The purchases at my Amazon store are at no extra cost to you than what you would pay directly from Amazon and they help support all the free information you find on this site. Thank you.
Talking with your baby
"Simply talking with an infant is a wonderful way to build attention, working memory, and self-control." Center on the Developing Child HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Babies love "conversations" where there is give and take. Their response IS with gurgling and babbling. Talking with your baby will help them talk, trust and learn. Somewhere around 4 to 6 months of age many babies will start to make sounds like "mmm" or "bbb" to interact with you.
The first language skill to develop is understanding what is heard. By around 6 months of age, most babies recognize the basic sounds of their parent's language.
Babies have the need for social interactions and lots of talk from loving adults also builds healthy relationships and social skills: building trust, dealing with emotional and physical needs, and interacting with others in positive ways. Many babies will calm down or smile when spoken to like the baby in the photo above.
By around 8 months of age some babies will try and imitate sounds that they hear. Keep in mind that all children vary in their development of language skills.
TALKING AND DEVELOPMENT: Research has shown that children from talkative families may have heard 30 million more words by age 3 than children from less-talkative families and that the more words the children had heard by age 3, the better they did on tests of cognitive development.
Having a talk in any language is a wonderful thing as bilingual children have been found to have better executive functioning skills than children who speak one language.
Tips on Learning to Talk from birth at Zero to Three
You might also like:
Games for baby: Tummy Time
Baby lying across a bolster at Gymboree tummy time
Please read my Tummy time article to find out how to play this fun game
and why it is important.
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