As discussed last blog post, there are lots of opportunities in the 0 to 3 period to work on language development. Even before verbal “Conversations” (post 7/7/10), we can help our little ones love books and the reading experience. Early on it does not have to be about the words on the page and naming objects as much as just creating a fun interactive experience with mom or dad. Babies love to hold the book and turn the pages and this should not be overlooked as important early literacy skill. Watch Whitney’s important excitement in picking out and bringing me a few books and then orienting the book so that she can turn the pages:

While reading try to make the experience interactive by going off the page. Books do not have be read linearly from front to back. Make it interactive. There are lots of body parts books that are just about naming the body part like hand, face, foot; instead of just labeling try to help your baby “DO” or use the body part. Babies learn best by doing so get them engaged and interacting with you:

What kind of conversations are you having with your little one? At the youngest ages, there is amazingly rich non-verbal dialogue but when it comes to talking we adults are doing most of it. Our toddlers do show a distinct progression in how they share their ideas. From one and a half to two yrs, toddlers usually have very simple and isolated ideas. For example, in the video below, Whitney expresses that she would like me to “sit down” next to her while she eats lunch and then tries to communicate that she does not want her usual nap after lunch:

This conversation is characterized by isolated ideas without much fluency and really no narrative at all. Between 2.5 and 3 years, our toddlers begin to connect their isolated islands of understanding into more comprehensive narratives across events and time. These Narratives go further than just words to describe things. Narratives have a dramatic through line with actors who have desires directed toward goals which take place in a context. Below is an example of Whitney’s new ability with conversation and narrative stories:

Whitney was now beginning to understand how one event leads to another (a storm can create a mess); how ideas operate across time (If the mess was created yesterday; today we need to clean it up); and how ideas operate across space (If the street sweeper can clean up the street, it could also clean-up our driveway). Ideas can now be used to explain emotions (I don’t like that noise from the machines; that noise makes me mad) and for logical thinking (that is fantasy instead of reality). This period is a monumental stepping stone toward mature, rational thinking. You can have conversations on just about anything at anytime and anywhere, so engage your toddler and see what they have to say.

Last time you were in the backyard or grassy park, what kind of learning adventures did you notice your infants or toddlers undertaking and what did you do to support and extend the experience? There are lots of rich learning explorations to be had in the backyard. Here in the video below, my daughter Whitney found lots of things that peaked her interest for further investigation from flowers and butterflies to bees and clovers:

I tried to encourage her to explore those interests simply by labeling them and then probing with more questions. I also tried to embed some “numeracy” into her clover collecting by supporting her counting skills. Whitney was starting to learn that the order of numbers matters and discovering that the last number tells how many. Notice how when she counts that clovers first by herself she really can’t do it so well but by my helping her lay out the daisies in a row and scaffolding her, she could better exercise her early counting in this meaningful context. For us parents finding ways to embed the learning in everyday fun and meaningful activities is what it is all about. So next time we are out in the backyard, let’s look for all those great opportunities to create richer learning adventures.

The recurring idea in my posts is that we can take any old everyday activity or routine and make it a learning adventure for our babies. Take the daily jog. You can’t really get more mundane than that and it is largely an activity for the adult to get exercise. Babies are not doing a whole bunch besides sitting in the jogger seat. So how does this become a learning adventure for a baby? Simple, you narrate the heck out of whatever you encounter along the way. Don’t worry about sounding silly or talking too much, the more the better, click the play button below:

Notice how every step of the jog really is an opportunity for learning– from getting Whitney’s coat, to buckling her buckle, to the seaguls, piers and kayaks we run across while jogging. One small example I would like to point out is “scaffolding” her while she snaps her buckle. At first Whitney cannot get the buckle to snap so she asks me to do it. In these situations we do not think twice about helping out and buckling the buckle for our toddlers but when we do it for our children we deprive them of a learning opportunity and an opportunity to learn that “can-do” disposition for tackling the world. Instead of buckling it for her, I “scaffold” to enable her to do it. It is the simple step of just holding the female part of the buckle steady for her so that she can better direct the buckle into it. This way she learns that she can do it herself; not that she needs to rely on others because she can’t. Again, we as parents should be providing the minimum level of support so that our children can do it themselves and feel that emotion of applying the effort and getting the result they want. This builds the disposition for perseverance and a can-do attitude. Done numerous times a day or week it makes a huge difference.

With the arrival of Memorial day and the onset of summer, it is easy to predict that anyone with a baby is going to be doing lots of water play over the next few months (if not already this past weekend). So next time while on duty watching your little one in the pool or at the beach, look for the hidden secrets your child is discovering while exploring water. Those seemingly simple pours or splashes probably involve some serious thinking and problem solving that we adults don’t readily see. And it is a lot of fun to speculate about what is going on inside that little mind.

Take my daughter Whitney at the pool in the videos below, when I slowed down and really observed her play, there were lots of really interesting nuggets of thinking I could notice. This first video shows her transferring water back and forth between cups:

We take for granted the transferability of water. That of course when you pour from one cup to the other, the same amount of water is going to show up in the new cup (eg the law of conservation). However, our little ones do not take this for granted and want to experiment again again to test what will happen.

There is a lot of stuff they find fascinating that we view as trivial. Here a serious interest in “Overflow”:

Of course, we don’t pour additional water into a cup that is full but our toddlers will do it again and again. They are discovering the personality of water. It overflows down the sides when they continue to pour in the cup.

Lastly, what happens when another cup is pushed down instead of another — aha! –Displacement occurs:

While they are running their experiments in understanding water, they are also exercising all sorts of thinking, communication, social & emotional and physical skills. Again, this is how the richest learning works. In the context of figuring out something they care about, and show an interest in, they challenge and exercise all the budding skills of development from the physical skill of twisting their wrists to pour the water to the cognitive skill of trying out, remembering and employing the tactic that delivers the desired result. So try to be as creative as you supplying tools and encouraging play extensions that come to mind based on what interests your child. Over the summer let’s all look at our child’s water play with new lenses.

To share or not to share that is the question– do we let our little ones get their hands on our new iPad. As you might guess from my previous, Screen-based media (10/28), post I do believe that there is a responsible way to explore almost anything that a baby can get their eyes, ears, nose, or hands on. Tools and devices such as the iPad will be an increasingly important part of our child’s world so why not let them get a jump start if they show an interest. And my daughter Whitney definitely showed an interest in what daddy was doing with that electronic thing in his hands and wanted to get her hands on it. So I downloaded a few Apps targeted at her age & stage and let her have at it. Wow, was I impressed with how quickly Whitney mastered the interface and figured it out. Computers, iPads, mobile devices, DVDs/VOD boxes are truly our children’s machines and I think we need to rethink our ideas about No Use policies with an open mind and creatively figure out the best uses of these machines at each age and stage of development:

The problem solving required to figure out the machine and the Apps on these machines is wonderful. As demonstrated in the video, Whitney quickly figured out the on/off button, the way you finger scroll to get to different Apps, how to stop the scroll and then touch the desired App to launch it. She then quickly mastered the featrues of each App, even how to make it bigger and smaller on the screen (which BTW took me a lot longer to figure out). Our infants and toddlers are not intimidated in the least. They want to jump right in and give it a try. If we provide the minimum support our babies need and scaffold them appropriately for their age and stage, there are no limits to their discovery.

After the garden the next step along the food chain is letting a baby help out in the kitchen with the preparation of the meal. Again there are lots of developmentally appropriate ways to get babies involved in the preparation of their meals. We like to say if you can mix, mash, oosh it or goosh it, you can get your baby involved. And once again, mama’s little helper has a much better chance of eating it if she was involved in making it!

Here Whitney gets involved in stirring the batter for a waffle mix:

Mixing not only exercises Whitney’s fine motor skills while controlling the tool and stirring the batter, she is learning lots of vocabulary with the different ingredients of vanilla and cinnamon. She then turns her attention to art and becomes Jackson Pollack with her dripping batter creating circles and other designs. Learning can be taken in so many directions from this simple base and it is easy to follow a child’s lead.

eebee’s Adventures has a book called Mix & Mash Adventures that give lots of ideas for baby friendly recipes and ways to turn toddlers into active helpers in the kitchen. Here is a clip done with Parents TV that shows some of the fun learning opportunities in the kitchen:

Just like all the indoor nooks and crannies to explore, there are lots of worlds to explore outside the house as well—take the garden & gardening. It is easy to get babies involved in some developmentally appropriate aspect of the gardening process depending on their age. Having a family vegetable garden is a great long term project with rich learning over lots of years because despite most evidence that food comes from a grocery store, whenever possible creating small gardens will help our children develop a deeper appreciation and relationship with plants, foods, and the elements that go into a meal– the foundations for nutritional intelligence and healthy eating practices.

For the younger set, it does not have to be to complicated. “What’s dirt” is a great adventure for a infant. They love getting their hands in it and discovering the properties of earth. Watch this baby video I found on youtube; the baby is enthralled by exploring the dirt and why he can’t get it off his hands. Wet dirt can be very sticky– she is discovering.

Here is an older toddler, my daughter Whitney, discovering the joys of harvesting the Rosemary:

Lastly, at 2.5 years they can get involved in more complicated tasks for the garden, like painting the square foot gardening box:

Participating in as many aspects of the family garden as possible gives your baby a great start in their relationship with food and eating habits. If they helped make it, there is a much better chance they will eat it!!

For our babies almost any place and anything around the home is a world to explore– take drawers and cabinets. We have all seen our babies’ beeline for a drawer we just put something away in or the cabinet in the bathroom we just opened. Frequently my initial impulse is to say “no, no” that is not for you. But instead of going with that habitual response, when I can catch myself I say go right ahead; let’s explore this place and these things together. In fact when we do there are a lot of neat things to discover. The video below shows how a quick tour through the bathroom sink cabinet yields a bounty of learning and development with language, thinking and problem solving, and social interaction. Click to view:

This cabinet has a foot scrapper, and clothing iron, hair curls and more interesting stuff for Whitney. Now if  this stuff was hot like the clothing iron and the hair curls these are a no-no but while cold in the cabinet why not explore them. The clothing iron has a container for water, a button to press and a cool control knob to turn. Whitney exercises her problem solving skills in figuring out how these features work. She exercises her language skills as she finds the vocabulary to use for the “wa-wa” container. She exercises her social skills looking to me for approval and emotional support for her forays while I still nervously say “no-no” eventhough cold in the cabinet it is all safe for her exploration. And then she finishes with a flurry of door closing as she reveals her understanding of what happens when we are all done.  See these simple little ordinary moments can be quite the Learning Adventure. Eebee’s DVD episode Little Objects, Big Ideas is all about turning these everyday things into rich learning explorations.

These opportunities for learning adventures happen throughout the day in all sorts of settings. Reading the Who’s Your Daddy post titled Explore Your World reminded me that there are an almost infinite amount of opportunities to dive in and explore things around the house or as his post suggests around the neighborhood as well.  We parents just need to slow down, use a new lens to see all these opportunities and then jump right in with our babies.

OK.  So what am I thankful for?  I’m thankful that what we do, the products we create, and the goals we set for ourselves

allow us the privilege to help real families make discoveries, play, smile and sometimes just get through the day.  Remember Achilles?  I blogged about him in December 2007.  He was 6 months old then, and as now, battling with andwinning in his fight against his congenital heart defect.  According to his mom, Ali, our Thanksgiving guest blogger, eebee made a profound difference in their lives.  We recently caught up, and it appears that eebee continues to play a meaningful role in this family’s life.  I asked Ali to share her update with us…. (thanks, Ali!  And thanks to all of the families who on a daily basis help us to spread the word about eebee simply by telling their stories!) Happy Thanksgiving.

Stephen

Chille, eebee & me

by Ali Bergstrom (Chille & eebee’s mom)

I joke that Eebee has one helluva passport.  You see, Eebee has been
everywhere my son has been since he was only 4 months old.  My son,
Chille, is now 2.5 years, so how far can THAT be?  Quite far, actually…

Early on, Chille’s home became wherever we were.  One day that could mean our apartment in East Harlem in New York City and another day it could be the Intensive Care Unit at the local Children’s Hospital.

My son was born with a congenital heart defect.  While heart defects are the most common birth defect in the world, affecting more children in the US than AIDS, Cancer and Autism COMBINED, only 50% of all diagnoses are made when the child is alive.  I knew when I was 20 weeks pregnant that my son would need open heart surgery to save his life.  I had a while to prepare for it, but what caught me off guard entirely was living in the ICU for months at a time with a little baby that needed to be entertained and distracted from painful procedures.  Enter Eebee…

I know that there is a lot of controversy about young children and
television.  I don’t know if it makes my son smarter, although he does
speak English, Mandarin and Arabic and knew all his letters and numbers by
age 2.  But what I do know is that with a young 6 month old baby who is
lying on his back all day in a busy ICU with 24 hour lights and sounds,
watching television is pretty much the only alternative after a mother has
lost her voice from reading and singing all day to her infant son.  So
that’s what we did.  We watched DVDs.  For hours upon hours every day for
months at a time, Chille watched Eebee gurgle and giggle, move about and
explore.  Eebee was there when Chille endured his second open heart
surgery at 6 months and Eebee was there when he had a pacemaker implanted
to keep my son alive.  Eebee had hospital wrist bands and was covered with
heart monitor stickers and doctors always listened to Eebee’s heart before
the stethoscope ever reached my son.  With all the back and forth between
hospital and home, one thing remained constant:  Eebee.

Eebee was just like my son.  He had two eyes and a nose and hair you could
grab.  When things were looking up for us and we went home for an extended
period, the physical and occupational therapists that entered my home
twice a day, 5 days a week used Eebee to demonstrate to my son how to roll
over and how to sit up.  My son would use all his effort just to be like
Eebee.

So when Chille and I had to pack up and move half-way around the globe for
a year, guess who went with us to Australia?   No matter where my son
traveled, there was Eebee.   Eebee has been on more airplanes than I can
count!  It is difficult to provide the consistency of environment that
children crave.  And yet, by carrying Eebee’s DVDs in my handbag and
popping it in everywhere we go, the decor is always the same.  Bright,
smiling people surrounding Eebee.  And Chille began to look at his
environment like that, as well.  The nurses were bright and smiling, the
flight attendants bright and smiling. Eebee taught me that simple cups of
water can be valuable playthings to use during a layover in an airport or
while waiting for test results at the hospital.  Paper streamers that I
once thought were reserved for birthday parties became the norm in every
room we’ve ever stayed in.  Balls of every shape and size and a hamper of
laundry can be found anywhere.  Eebee gave a tired and scared mom the
ingredients for adventure.  Eebee gave my little boy a family and a home,
no matter where we were in the world.

Although my son now enjoys more friends and experiences out of the home,
Eebee still remains.  And I admit that every evening, as I kiss my son
goodnight and turn off the lights, I give Eebee a little peck on his
orange head and wish them both peaceful dreams and awesome adventures.

Ali Bergstrom is an athlete, musician and writer who lives in NYC with her
son, Chille.  Follow along as Chille experiences just another ordinary day
in an extraordinary city.  www.extraordinarycity.com