We practice responsive, attachment style parenting and our educational philosophy is currently a bit of a mix of stuff incorporating bits of Montessori, bits of learning-through-play, partly child-led and partly parent-guided. We follow no particular curriculum, aim for learning rather than teaching, and our education efforts mostly centre around games and fun, encouraging Audrey to be excited about learning.
To start with, I absolutely love reading other parent's blogs. I learn so much and get so inspired by what other people are doing and it always motivates me to be a better parent day by day. Here are some of my favourites:
This article on goodjobandotherthings.com is one of my favourites, and sums up a lot about what our parenting style aims to be - I think it's a really challenging post, and it inspires me to want to live up to that challenge.
This entire blog makes me happy, and I check it just about every day. It's the first parenting blog I started reading, and probably still my favourite. If you're new to this particular blog, start here with the birth story of her second daughter (and be warned, it packs quite an emotional punch).
I especially love this Mama's approaches to art, food and conflict solving. I love the respect this family so clearly has for each other, and how they work as a team rather than with an "us and them" mentality.
By far the best early years education blog I follow is http://wecandoallthings.blogspot.co.uk/ - although the focus is on home educating a child with special needs, I get new ideas from this blog that I can put into practice with Audrey every single time I look at it.
Next I want to talk about the books that we like. Obviously books are a great learning tool, even at this young age. Audrey isn't too bothered by stories so generally we like books with good pictures. Our absolute favourites are the Dorling Kindersley "My First" range - My First Animals and My First Colours etc. I like them because they use photos rather than drawings and because they have lots of different pictures on one page. We ask Audrey to point to the zebra, the shoes, the toothbrush, the ladybird etc. We ask what noise does this animal make? And now she's talking more we say "What's this animal called?" We work on colours - can you point to something red? What colour is this star?
Having said that Audrey's not keen on stories, there are some of the simple, repetitive story books that she'll enjoy. Repetitive stories are so good for young children's development, and our favourites include We're Going On A Bear Hunt and our good night book from Canada. Our good night book features pictures of various animal drawn in Native American art saying good night, and we also use this to practice counting - "one whale humming softly, two whales humming softly" etc.
For herself, Audrey loves books that have different textures such as the "That's Not My..." range. This is great sensory stuff, and gives us the chance to use vocab like soft, scratchy, rough, shiny, smooth.
Although we don't have a tv capable of receiving tv signal, Audrey does like to watch videos on youtube some times. We really really love the kidstv123 videos, especially the phonics songs. Audrey now anticipates most of the letters ("apple - cat - dog!!") and can say some of the phonics sounds when you point to the letters, such as a, b, c, f. She really has learned an awful lot from these videos, and I sometimes sing the songs with her when we're doing other things as she enjoys them a lot.
Other than those, she likes to watch French children's cartoon Trotro, and it has helped her a lot with making the French sounds, although she doesn't have many words yet. She sings the theme song to this, it's adorable.
We sing a lot of nursery rhymes with actions, which helps with motor skills as well as language. Some favourites include the wheels on the bus, wind the bobbin up and heads, shoulders, knees and toes.
There are so many toys, activities, games etc. which are helpful for development that I'm not going to start making a list here. Almost everything we do is a learning activity if you look at it in the right way, if you really engage with your child and let them be involved with what you're doing. But I might talk about more specific ideas in future posts!
I hope this might be helpful to someone at some point, even if just for me to look back on. She's growing and changing and learning so fast, every day is different and exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment