The pen is mightier than the sword… but only if held by a very strong hand.

Like his Daddy, No1 child has squiggly writing. It’s not easy when you’ve a had full of ideas, yet a single word takes so long to write that by the time it’s done you’ve forgotten what comes next. So I’m very lucky to see him getting some extra help at school in a thoroughly playful way (Thnx E, welikeplay is indebted).

The rational goes like this: writing - and in particular penmanship - is not purely a cerebral activity, rather it is the body doing what the brain wants in moving a pen through the arcs and loops on a piece of paper in front of you. If it is so much to do with the body then perhaps exercise to build up the writing muscles will help. I’ve a hunch that the link between early walkers and later dyslexia is due partly to the lack of crawling and the building up of muscles around the upper body.

So, to build up strength and coordination to allow children to sit at a desk and grip a pen with less hassle here are a week-ful of playful exercises to introduce.

Stair slithering. Ok, you’ve spent the last 5-7 years teaching them to go down stairs, now its time to let them slither down on their tummy. Explain that you’re all to use your arms stretched out in front of you to hand-walk down; and when they’ve got that, to hoist them selves up again.

Putty squashing. Mix up a pot of Homebrew Snot to squish and stretch obsessively whilst watching TV for big strong fingers.

Tunnel your house. For a day or two take the cushions off the sofa, grab all blankets, clothe-racks and pegs, play tents and old cardboard boxes and create a castle/fort/warren inside your house that everyone has to use. Take tunnels from the kitchen through to the living room and even to the loo to encourage an awful lot of crawling.

Be mermaids/men. Visit a charity/thrift store for a too big pair of tracky-bums (that’s englandish for track suit trousers); tuck one leg in and down the other to make a tail. Add shells and flop around the house all day. If you’re feeling brave/playful, get a pair for every member of the family. Hang shredded kitchen foil from the lamps and have an underwater tea-party.

Hang off the sofa for a bedtime story. Together stick your shins/thighs on the cushion of the sofa, place hands on the ground either side of the book for a story time. To take it further a bed time snack can be chopped up in a bowl to be eaten from the floor.

Do the ‘Hand-wash only’ laundry. Fine, less of a play and more of a chore, but I’m constantly surprised at how much kids enjoy inclusion in mundane tasks. And with the added benefit that wringing clothes out and pegging them still heavy with water on a line really exercise those grippy muscles.

Find a grassy hill, roll down. Rolling down hills teaches, very quickly, the art of not ploughing a furrow with your forehead. This is done by using tummy muscles to keep the head up at the right time… and it’s good fun for grown ups too; last time we did it we got an audience.

Do not let these exercises become a chore, reward enthusiasm with attention, reward success with praise. Don’t let the above become limiting, invent your own (and leave them in the comments below). Join in, giggle and get it wrong, let your kids stumble upon you doing them by yourself… and above all

…enjoy.

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Shrove Tuesday, a.k.a. Pancake day, really crept up on me this year; probably something to do with a full moon on the spring equinox, and so a really early Easter with a chance of mad bunnies. So his morning I’ve trialled a few pancake making devices, some things that you can rustle up around the home to help kids learn to flip them like a pro.

You will need
frying pans - though big heavy ones are great for cooking the real pancakes in, for kids to help they need one they can lift
old bits of cloth and cardboard
an easy-to-dry kitchen

for the pancakes (makes 12-ish)
100g plain flour, sifted
2 eggs
200ml milk mixed with 75ml water
50g butter

Get the kids to mix up the flour, eggs and milky bits as soon as they come in from school… this kind of batter can be used straight away, but works better if you let it sit for an hour or so before frying up.

Now it’s time to make your pseudo-pancakes for practice time.  Draw and cut out circles of fabric/cardboard roughly the same size as the base of your frying pans.  Take these bits of material and soak them in tepid water… or chilled if you’re feeling mean.  Now teach the kids to flip them with a deft forward-up-and-back motion of the wrist.  Do it well and the water won’t spray; too quick or too hard and everyone starts to get wet.  High arcing flips to land the damp pseudo-cake on ones own head are to be commended.

After a little experimentation I recommend using the thighs of old jeans as the material of choice.  It gets good and damp, yet slides well out of pans.  Felt is a tad too sticky when wet, old flannels are a too crumply, art-foam sheets form little suction cups on the pan, whilst thick cardboard - though initially good - starts to come apart after 10 minutes or so.

Mop the kitchen floor and attempt with real pancakes.

Pancakes are a great way to introduce kids to safe stove top cooking.  As you have to hang around the cooker it gives them more time to watch and see what happens to the flame/halogen top, than your usual stick on a pan and bring to boil.  So get one pan good and hot, drop in a lump of butter until it sizzles.  Then take the batter mixture and pour out a couple of tablespoons, I’ve always found this is best done from a ladle so it all arrives at the same time whilst giving a long handle for littler hands.  Cook for less than a minute until you can pull back a corner and see that the bottom has gone all brown.  Now it’s flipping time.  Hot pan, check for others, two hands, flip and catch.  Award points for any pancakes that make it up to the light fixtures or maybe give a special topping for the most fragmented, so that all feel encouraged.

Depending on age you might like to flip with both you and the child holding the handle, or perhaps you might pre-cook a handful and slide them off into a cold frying pan to be slung around with abandon.

Enjoy (with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkle of sugar)

tag... play for today, 2up, 3up, 5up, 8up, be helpful, cooking, enjoy and achieve, stay safe

When I was a boy RoSPA (the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) was one of the driving forces being making me and all the UK’s children wear seatbelts back in the late ’70s. As we had black plastic seats they caused me to endure a fair amount of thigh-burn to me on hot summer days. But their heart was in the right place. And now they’re making the right noises again.

From the Times;

Suffering from a twisted ankle or skinned knee should be an everyday part of childhood, according to Tom Mullarkey, the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).

He said that overzealous bureaucrats were undermining legitimate concerns about health and safety by applying guidance too literally and failing to use common sense.

Play is that in which children find their own capabilities and boundaries.  They need to sit on the edge of the wall to find out how good their balance can be.  They have to be free to fail and fall; and we have to be better than all the king’s horses.

Panic a little, but
enjoy.

tag... play, stay safe

I don’t worry unduly about my kids when their online, usually because they first have to wrest the laptop top from my hands and then put up with me lurking to reclaim it. So surfing has become a communal activity at the welikeplay HQ; we’re looking up their latest question (last week it was, how many people are there in the world?) then talking about all the stuff they come across as it happens. May I recommend this as a set up from a young age as the best possible way of staying safe. None of this computers in your bedroom stuff, the internet was set up as a corporate rather than a solitary medium and is best used as such.

Last month we even got past browsing and journeyed together into Second Life (if you’ve come across Eco Dynamo, I do apologise for seeming to have a hive-mind, there’s three of us on the keyboard at once), though I did a reccie the night before to check out the calibre of the neighbourhoods we would visit. A very good way of passing an hour or so during the holidays.

I’ve talked with the boys about icky or frightening stuff they might find online; and until their hormones kick in they’re not too interested, though funnily enough they seemed more worried about stumbling upon it by accident. To that end I’ve just deleted their IE shortcuts and installed FoxFilter for Firefox. This scans the page for dodgy words and phrases and blocks.  OK it blocked a post here which had the word adult and the word free (and will now block this post too) until I added welikeplay.org to the exclude list.  Now a determined child could circumnavigate FoxFilter, but that’s not the point. I’ve not stuck it in to thwart them, but to stop any mis-clicks that would lead to “Daddy, what are they doing?”… “What, upside-down?”

And that, for now, will do.

tag... play, 5up, 8up, geeky, stay safe

This, in the UK, week is road safety week.  Parents and minders might like to try some of the following links:

• Uk Gov stuff
• Mayor of London’s kids zone
• Make a pledge to drive safely
• for minders, use the pre-school resources from ‘Brake’ - the road safety charity.

Enjoy.

tag... play, out and about, stay safe

Over at Supernanny Rules, Gayla has posted a lovely article on creating a room free of ogres, trolls and bogeymen under the bed. She is acknowledging that children need their safe space, and a space that they can call their own. Without such space there is nowhere for them to withdraw and regroup before setting out on their next new adventure.

4d’s of safe space

• Delineate - make sure there’s a door to pull to, or a curtain hanging up, or a bunkbed for shared rooms. Something to say this is yours and this isn’t.
• Decorate - choose colours, and furniture with the, so they can say “look at that, it’s mine”.
• Design - take an old chest-of-draw, let them add sticky stars and take their ownership of the space a little further.
• De-militarise - when other kids come round to play, keep the bedroom out of bounds. It’s a place for your own to call their own.  No TVs or computer games… these are sociable vaporise-your-mum-and-dad-on-playstation activities.

Add a little play magic

In play imaginary up-wellings can be caught and transmogrified. Monster can be hunted - bad-beasties of all kinds melt upon contact with water; for proof watch Wizard of Oz. Armed with such information we sometimes have a small plant-mister sitting ready. Liberal spraying by parent and child can dowse bogey-beasts and bogarts in giggles.

We also have a story chair, monsters do crop up, but stories deal with them. Dragons are slain, lost is found, Max returns from Where the Wild Things Are and Not Now, Bernard is eaten… erm scratch that last one. Narrative plays with ideas, it takes ideas from here to there.

And when the monsters are there, when there has been sadness and stress. Play. Fight or frighten the monsters. Turn them into tales. But know that they’re real.

tag... play, 2up, 3up, 5up, stay safe

I’ve found the most fantastic book for inclusion in the welikeplay library. By itself it has engrossed No1 child and me for a whole week of evenings. The Book of How is a book to be read with a growed-up around to talk too, it takes on big issue questions in a page each. Questions like “How do glow-worms light up?” are back to back with pages on “How can I make friends?”; “How can I prove video games won’t make me stupid?” goes hand in hand with “How are babies made?”.

Perhaps it’s the old teacher in me; but these questions on ‘me and my world’, and the play with ideas that they start is how children start creating and playing with their own internal philosophy. The Book of How doesn’t ever give definitive personal answers; when it talks of more faith based questions of God and life after death, it wisely talks about what believers hold. Likewise when it tackles social issues, like being accepted in social groups or thinking about justice, it doesn’t give answers - it gives strategies to try.

An inspirational book which has led me and No1 to sit up past proper bedtime discussing the nature of stuff. What could be better… perhaps getting my hands on The Book of Why.

tag... review, play for today, play, 8up, books, philosophising, stay safe

For many Halloweens now I’ve had little ones around, and it can be a scary time for some of them. Not only do they get their first glimpse of night as they perhaps stay up late for the first time; but the night is populated with all kinds of weird things.

Over the last two years I’ve adopted a smiling lantern policy. Not only is a carving pumpkins one of those shared family activities that helps small children ‘own’ a part of Halloween. But by making it non-threatening it is almost as if it makes a household guardian that keeps away the night. Conversely a scary face that’s been made in the house brings the scaryness within the safe walls of home.

So carve a smiley face; use a drill to make nice round holes rather than scary triangular eyes. You can also print out my masks up sign to help the bigger kids think about the really little ones.

And let them enjoy.

tag... play, be helpful, out and about, philosophising, stay safe

I’ve been incredibly lucky, in the years I’ve been doing childcare I’ve only had to deal with a few toddler explosions; and only, so far, from mine own.

Tantrums happen, I don’t believe that any parent gets away scott free. Instead we have to develop our own schemes and strategies to respond to these upwellings. Frequently they are born of frustration, toddlers have so much tumbling around in their minds that they often struggle to get it out using the few words they have. Often this is compounded as they reach a developmental milestone - I remember a week of stropiness, followed by the ability to use the past tense quite well indeed. Or perhaps its a situation where the toddler feels insecure in the midst of a barrage of new experiences; like theme parks, parties, or the bright glow of the supermarket. The Rev’d Welikeplay quite often warns of the post-baptism freak out, usually the day after a family event where the child is simply hacked-off with being passed around.

Top 3 tantrum tips: read on »

tag... play, 2up, 3up, be helpful, philosophising, stay safe

It’s been 50 years since Sputnik beeped down at us (4th October, 1957); and to mark the event we’re going to make some little rockets. Hey we even may go the whole way and bako-wrap the furniture.

You will need
to go outdoors
a 35mm film-capsule; since these are getting rarer we’re going to experiment with the little 3 pots of chocolate gu
a sized alkerseltzer
water

Warning - children should respect medicine, even if its a hangover cure; and to be careful around things that explode, even if they’re hangover cures too. These kind of plays are great opportunities for such lessons, especially for the ‘imagine this little capsule is your tummy’ kind.

It’s very simple, first explain about running away, then half fill the capsule with water, add the alkerseltzer, squeeze the lid on, place upside-down and run away giggling madly. Repeat until not funny any more, which I suspect might take a week or two.

Enjoy

tag... play for today, 5up, 8up, makes, stay safe