Playing with movement and balance If you've spent five minutes with a young child recently, you'll have noticed that they almost never, ever stop moving except when they're asleep. Movement is one of the primary ways that young children explore their world and learn about their own bodies. Babies, especially, are learning new ways to move and balance almost every month. Here are some fun activities that you can do at home to capitalize on your child's love of movement.
Two Feet, Two Hands This activity is great for toddlers learning simple numbers and balance skills. Ask your child to make a shape with their body that has "two fee and two hands" on the floor. Then, change the combination by asking for "one foot, one hand." Get as creative as you can and challenge your child's physical dexterity and problem solving skills. BONUS TIP: If you do this project in tandem with your child, you can use even more number combinations - "three feet and four hands" is suddenly possible! Stepping Stones This is a variation of the "hot lava" game that we all used to play. Designate one area of your room as the river, and the goal of this game is to get from one side to the other. Use books, stools, or pillows to create a path of stepping stones across the river and see how fast you can cross. Challenge your child by placing the "stones" farther and farther apart, or see if you can do the challenge together. BONUS TIP: The adults in the house can offer up their own bodies as human "bridges" that the children must cross. In, Around, and Through Strengthen your child's understanding of spacial vocabulary by playing a variation of "Simon Says." Have a race to see how fast your child can find a position in relation to other objects in the room. Use words like "under, over, inside, between, around, on top of, behind, and beneath" to help them stretch their physical skills as well as having hands-on connection to new words and concepts. Have fun moving! Let us know if you have any other favorite movement games that we can add to our list.
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Having fun while trapped inside We're cancelling classes because of a snow storm today, and we thought you might like a few tips on staying creative while staying inside.
The Classic Snow storm = hibernation = pillow fort. We here at Spellbound have a well-documented love of blanket forts, and this classic creative play activity is a great chance for kids (and adults) of any age to stretch their imagination. Build your own snow cave and imagine who might live inside. For babies, forts can be a great time to talk about spacial concepts like "up," "down," "in," and "out." For toddlers and preschoolers, you can make suggestions about different places they might be: a castle, a cave, a ship. For elementary kids, this is a chance to write a full-length drama with characters, subplots, and intrigue. There is no end to the fun that can be provided with some blankets, tables, and pillows. The Avant Garde Bored with your crayons and construction paper? Make some full-body art inside! Just get your child nude and pop them in a steamy tub with a watercolor set and a selection of brushes. Don't fill the tub, just run enough to keep them warm and get the colors in the watercolors nice and rich, and then go to town! Babies love to explore different parts of their bodies by painting (or having you paint) their toes, their belly, their nose. Toddlers who are steady on their feet can stand and paint the walls. As they get older, you can encourage your child to paint a representative picture, or even to tell a story through a mural. The great thing about this activity is that it is very satisfyingly messy, but the only thing you need to do to clean up is pull the curtain and turn on the shower. The Sculptor Bring a tray of snow inside and make a 3-D melting sculpture at your table. You can paint the snow with watercolors and experiment with combining primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) to make secondary colors (green, purple, and orange). If you make a colored ice sculpture and lay it on a piece of white finger-painting paper, as it melts the color will make a beautiful color design. This is not only a fun art-making activity, but also a great opportunity to dig into science in a creative way. Make predictions about how long it will take different sculptures to melt and chart your results! The Performance Artist Turn off the lights, grab a flashlight, and see what kind of shadows you can make on the walls or a curtain. You can use body shapes, objects, or even build a shadow puppet. Take your child on a hunt through the house to find different materials such as paper, fabric, and plastic and experiment with which ones are opaque and which are semi-transparent. You can also play around with size and shape by changing the distance between the flashlight, the object, and the wall. What makes an object bigger? More focused? Can you make an object's shadow look like something other than what it really is? Stay warm, friends! And please share any other ideas you have for snow day fun at home. This week we explored shadow puppetry in class. Shadows and light are facinating for even the youngest baby, and of course the older your child gets, the more they will be able to explore this exciting medium. For this blog post, I want to focus on different materials to consider using when playing with shadows. FLASHLIGHTS: The best flashlights to use for shadow puppetry are those with a rounded lens, like this one. They are not always the most common brand at the store, but if you search for Cree or Rayz you will find some affordable options. Avoid flashlights with multiple LED bulbs (looks like a dozen or so bubbles under the lens) because they will distort the light and make blurry shadows. The lights listed above are all LED, which are pretty bright. Great for making shadows, but your baby could hurt their eyes by shining the light directly into their face. Traditional bulbs are lower lumens and safer, and you can make them even dimmer by putting in some partially-used batteries. Plus, you can find traditional bulbs in fun child-friendly shapes and colors. PUPPETS I like making shadow puppets with colored cellophane or construction paper cut into geometric shapes. You can also make them out of foamy stickers that are already in an interesting shape by just adding a stick. If you're interested in purchasing some shadow puppets, Moulin Roty has some delightful and durable sets. LIGHT UP TOYS I love light up objects that can fascinate children by turning a familiar object into something surprising. My favorite go-to is an LED juggling ball, but nightlights and other light-up baby toys can create the same effect. Make sure you choose an item that does not have an exposed bulb to make sure you aren't risking a burn. Remember - none of these products are designed for babies, so you should always exercise care when introducing them to your young child. Always supervise the use of lighting and shadow toys - allow your child to explore and make discoveries, but be watchful in order to avoid the chance of a choking hazard coming loose or a puppet stick being waved around. Enjoy these fun shadow/light ideas, and let us know if you have any other products you recommend. If you have ever spent more than 5 mintues around a young child, you have probably noticed that they love making noise. Whether blowing raspberries with their mouths, banging on pots, or watching a passing ambulance with fascination, sounds are a big part of a small person's world. This week we are playing with noise and sounds in our Creative Play classes and want to share some fun ideas for playing with sounds at home:
Playing with noise comes naturally to children and they may not need much encouragement for these simple activities, but you can encourage them to expand their curiosity by using words like soft, loud, fast, slow, smooth, and sharp to describe the sounds that they are making. Any other favorite sound games? Put them in the comments section so we can all share! Playing comes naturally to young children. Not only is it a skill that they are inherently born with, it is also the primary way in which they learn. Through playing with movement, objects, and other people, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers learn about social roles and interactions, how the world works, and, most importantly, they learn how to learn. Play is our first platform for problem solving, trial and error, critical thinking, and experimentation. It is no wonder that play-based learning is a prevalent trend in early childhood education, as can be seen by the rise in Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and arts-integrated preschool programs. So, if play is a natural and instinctual process, why sign up for play-based schools or creative play classes? What benefits are there in playing in a more structured setting? At Spellbound Theatre, we believe there are several great reasons for playing in a group setting, and they are closely related to our practice as artists.
At Spellbound we play through the arts - dance and song and storytelling and puppets and circus. The link between art and play is something we infuse into all of our education and performance programs, and something we hope to pass on to the children and adults who participate in our activities. Whether you come to one of our plays, attend a storytime, or join one of our creative play classes, we hope to share our love of artful play with you and your child, and inspire you to find ways to play in new and creative ways! Spellbound Theatre's Creative Play classes run in 8-week sessions and explore stories, dance, songs, movement, and puppets through play-based activities for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. Fall classes start September 23rd. To learn more, visit http://spellboundtheatre.com/classes. We have a bit of a heatwave going on in New York this week, and that has inspired us to share some ideas on how to stay cool with your baby, toddler, or young child while still sparking their creativity and having fun.
The Classic There's no incentive like a hot day to turn your livingroom or garden into a blanket fort. We here at Spellbound have a well-documented love of blanket forts, and this classic creative play activity is a great chance for kids (and adults) of any age to stretch their imagination. For babies, forts can be a great time to talk about spacial concepts like "up," "down," "in," and "out." For toddlers and preschoolers, you can make suggestions about different places they might be: a castle, a cave, a ship. For elementary kids, this is a chance to write a full-length drama with characters, subplots, and intrigue. There is no end to the fun that can be provided with some blankets, tables, and pillows. The Avant Garde If it's too hot for clothes, get your child nude and pop them in the tub with a watercolor set and a selection of brushes. Don't turn the water on, just run enough to get the colors in the watercolors nice and rich, and then go to town! Babies love to explore different parts of their bodies by painting (or having you paint) their toes, their belly, their nose. Toddlers who are steady on their feet can stand and paint the walls. As they get older, you can encourage your child to paint a representative picture, or even to tell a story through a mural. The great thing about this activity is that it is very satisfyingly messy, but the only thing you need to do to clean up is pull the curtain and turn on the shower. The Graffiti Artist If you have a shady spot available on a nearby sidewalk, bring out some sidewalk chalk and a bucket of ice. You can use the ice to "draw" on the sidewalk and then watch it evaporate in the heat. For preschoolers with great motor skills, bring brushes and some plain water and they can write or draw with the water using the brushes. This is a great opportunity to mix media and see how the ice and chalk interact together, but it also is a great opening for a arts integrated science lesson about ice, water, and evaporation. The Performance Artist Turn off the lights, grab a flashlight, and see what kind of shadows you can make on the walls or a curtain. You can use body shapes, objects, or even build a shadow puppet. Take your child on a hunt through the house to find different materials such as paper, fabric, and plastic and experiment with which ones are opaque and which are semi-transparent. You can also play around with size and shape by changing the distance between the flashlight, the object, and the wall. What makes an object bigger? More focused? Can you make an object's shadow look like something other than what it really is? Stay cool during this heatwave, friends! And please share any other ideas you have for low-key creative play! A frequent question I get asked in my Park Slope creative play classes is, "It seems that my one-year old is doing more watching than participating...is she ready for creative play?" The answer is YES! I always remind parents that watching IS participating for many children. Children learn in a variety of ways - through watching, listening, exploring, moving - and one of the primary ways they learn new activities is through seeing those activities modeled by adults and other children. Every week in class we do the same introductory activities. We warm up our bodies, we play a couple games, we sing our "going on an adventure" song. By the second, third, and fourth week, the children know what to expect from this portion of the class because they have been watching me, the other adults, and the other children doing these activities over and over again. Toddlers are extremely interested in routine and eager to participate, and once they have seen the pattern repeated several times they are excited to jump in and show that they know the game, too. That is why we create opportunities for adults to participate in our classes and model creativity. We are all teaching that routine and behavior to the young participants and inviting them to be a part of our multi-generational group. The same goes for the imaginative portion of the class where we spend more time pretending to be characters and telling a story. This is a complex and, many times, totally new concept for toddlers, but they learn how to play in this new way by watching the adults and other children in the room. This concept of modeling creativity is something we encourage parents and caregivers to take home with them. Every week, we give "homework" for the families to try at home. A new color game, or an idea for how to make a home-made instrument. We created this blog as a way to share and document some of these activities so that our families have a resource for fun, creative, playful activities to try at home that will stimulate your child's imagination and creativity. But these activities are not just for your child - they are for the whole family! Children love seeing you try new things and act a little silly. That is how they learn that it is fun to take risks and stretch their creative muscles. It is less important to do an activity "right" than to try something new and model the process of curiosity, exploration, and discovery. Please use the comments to share any additional games or activities that you use at your house, too! What is a puppet? It's an inanimate object, animated. Brought to life. For young kids, the most familiar kind of puppet is a hand puppet, or a finger puppet, which we can wear and move. This week, challenge yourself and your child to find some other object in your house that can become a puppet.
The easiest way to turn a familiar object into a puppet is to add eyes. Googley eyes or construction paper will do, although there's no limit to the fun ways you can add eyes to an object. Beans, buttons, stickers, get creative! Once you have eyes, practice finding your puppet's focus. With a preschooler, ask them to help their puppet look at the window, look at the book, look at the door. This focus will give the puppet life. With a smaller child or baby, you can be the puppeteer and make the puppet look at your little one. Have them lock eyes and play peek-a-boo. Once you have focus, find a distinct way that your puppet moves. Does it bounce? Slither? Stomp? Finally, add a funny voice. Something that will make your child laugh. Congrats! You are a puppeteer! If you started with something simple like a sock, move on to a more challenging object like a plate or pot or piano. Remember, ANYTHING can be a puppet! This week in our creative play classes for babies and toddlers, we played with many different circus-themed activities around "balance". We balanced objects, our bodies, and did partner balancing tricks (babies in the air!). Even though I'm not a circus-performer myself, I love leading circus-themed workshops for any age group because it is so different from the ways that we typically behave. We ask our bodies to do tricks and feats that we don't normally do on a daily basis - like bouncing a balloon on your head. We also interact with one another in very different ways, setting up challenges, giving loud cheers for silly acts. Demanding applause with a boisterous "Ta Da!!!"
These workshops are especially rewarding, though, when there are parents/caregivers working together with young people. We don't just ask the adults to watch and support, we ask them to fully participate and even lead. Some children need to watch a familiar adult model a new activity first before they are willing to give it a shot. This is true for balancing on one foot, but also for general silliness. It is so exciting and inspiring to watch moms, dads, grandparents, and babysitters shedding their serious, responsible role for 45 minutes, donning a red clown nose, and doing what it takes to get a big laugh from their baby. When children see us being silly and taking risks, several important things happen. Firstly, they sense a permission for them to take risks and try new things. Children need to see that the adults in their lives are in control of their surroundings, but they also love to see us try something new and even fail. This begins to teach them the important lesson of resilience and determination. Even more importantly, though, when children see adults acting silly, it expands their perception of the world. "Mama is not just this, she is also THAT." It encourages the development of empathy, but it also sparks delight, surprise, and curiosity. If grandpa can be silly, be childlike, and balance on top of a big yoga ball, then who knows what else is possible! This is one of the greatest delights I have in inter-generational learning, particularly with something as silly as circus. We can help each other learn in new ways, but both children and their adult companions have a chance to be surprised and delighted by what the other is capable of! We began our first workshop performances of Under the Tree in Port Chester this last weekend. In honor of this performance, I wanted to share some of our thoughts about creating interactive theatre with very young (ages 0-5) audiences. We have to consider many, many things, and here are a few that we spent a lot of time thinking about while crafting this uniquely interactive show.
It has been a great development phase for this play and we are learning so much from every audience we have join us "under the tree." I look forward to sharing more about our development in the future and producing this show in Brooklyn in June! |
Authors
Lauren Jost, Director Archives
December 2017
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