Category Archives: repetition

Smooth & Easy Transitions

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          Usually we think of transitions as something that must be done in order to get to something else, but very young children don’t think this way and can’t think this way.  Young children live in the moment.  So in order to have transitions go smoothly and enjoyably, change your view so that each transition is an activity in its own right, with a beginning, a middle and an end.  Think of it as a structured activity like circle-time.  It doesn’t happen in a ring, but it’s a series of actions to be done together, with song and verse.  It should be just as structured and just as enjoyable for the kids.
              Here are the steps that I use to make a transition go smoothly:
             1. Get everything you need ready before you start, so that children can be in motion the entire time (no waiting).  So this means, get handwashing stuff ready before you start tidying up to come to a meal.  In fact, we get our end-of-meal handwashing ready before we even start cleaning up from free-play, so that it’s a smooth transition from play to eating to cleaning up from a meal.  Think ahead!
             2.      Use songs during transitions.  This makes a HUGE difference!  Songs are really useful because they let a child know what’s coming, without all the talking.   You don’t have to be a great singer for these, just use songs you remember from your childhood, or take the tunes of songs you know and add simple words.  To the tune of “Twinkle twinkle little star” you could sing, “Find your shoes and put them on, find your shoes and put them on.”  You may use several songs, one for the start of the transition, and one for the end. It’s useful to use the same song each time for the same task, so that kids really get the hang of what happens when a certain song is sung.
                 3. Give individual tasks.  Giving tasks that children can accomplish is important.  First of all it keeps children engaged in what’s going on.  For instance, giving them something to carry out to the car when you’re going somewhere makes it much more likely that they’ll walk straight to the car, instead of getting distracted on the way.  But even more important, it allows the child to contribute to the process.  It goes more smoothly because he’s helping you.  You’re doing it together.
             4.  Keep things moving.  Start the process with some sort of fun thing that gets your child moving (a little game, or putting something in its place), then keep them moving smoothly then entire time.  So, start with tidying up, but then move seamlessly into getting ready to go outside.  Don’t stop and talk about it, just do it.  Children will be swept up in the movement of it and will most likely follow your lead.  Children do best when they’re in motion, so think of the entire transition process as a dance where you walz from one thing to the next.  If you do things in this way, once you get a child to stop his play, you can tidy up, get a fresh diaper, change the laundry, and get out the door.  If you have each step prepared, involve him in each step (give him individual tasks), use song and verse, and keep things moving, it will probably go well.  Better than breaking him away from his play four separate times, by far!


An Example
              So, using all of these tricks, getting yourself and your toddler out the door in the morning might look like this:  While he’s eating breakfast, you get everything you’ll need to take with you and put it by the door.  You also put his hat and his jacket on a little changing chair.  When you see that he’s about done with breakfast you sing out, “Last little nibbles!”  Before you get him out of his high chair, you get a warm washcloth and sing, “Wipe wipe wipe!  Wipe your face.  Wipe wipe wipe! Wipe your hand.  Wipe wipe wipe! You are clean.”  Then you lift him down, and give him his bowl to take to the kitchen.  You lift him up so he can set it on the counter, then immediately let him know it’s time to go get shoes on by saying, “Cockadoodle doo, my dame has lost her shoe!  My master’s lost his fiddle-stick and knows not what to do!  Where are YOUR shoes?”  As he runs over to them (or as you carry him over, if he’s not cooperating), you repeat the nursery rhyme at least two more times as he sits down in the changing chair.  He knows how things go, so he immediately starts trying to put his hat on.  I usually do hat first, then shoes, then jacket last (if it’s wintertime, hat first, then snowpants, then boots, then mittens, then jacket.  If you put mittens on first, they’re nicely tucked into the jacket sleeves).  Then get your own shoes and jacket on, and pick up your bags.  Take out one thing and say, “We’re ready to go!  I’ll carry the diaper bag.  Will you carry this for me please?” and then you walk out together.  As you’re walking from the house to the door, you have another song that you sing: this one a railroad song.  “I’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day…”  This is a long song, and it lasts the entire time as you get him into his car-seat.
                   If you have everything ready to go before you start, if you keep moving from one activity to the next (finishing breakfast to putting on shoes to walking out the door), if you use song and verse as you go, and you give individual tasks, then you can have a smooth and easy transition.
Warmly,
Miss Faith

Life As the Curriculum

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This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for my teleclass, Joyful Days with Toddlers!  The Sunday class is completely full, but there are still two slots in the Tuesday class if you’re interested.  It starts this Tuesday, March 1st 2011, and calls are from 6:30-7:45pm Mountain Time.  Please email me if you’d like one of those two spots at faithrainbow@yahoo.com

 People often think they have to have a “curriculum” to be teaching the children things, or they feel guilty because they don’t have a formal curriculum. Curriculum subjects I’ve seen have ranged from numbers, colors and letters, to subjects such as germs or pirates.  However, it seems to me that ‘teaching’ things like colors is silly, because they’ll learn it anyhow, and subjects like germs and pirates don’t relate to their lives at all.
What I am here to suggest is that young children really learn all they “should” be learning through their own play and through watching and participating in the daily tasks that go into running a household. Gross motor skills come from putting things on a shelf or rolling dough with a rolling pin; fine motor skills come from decorating bread with raisins or folding a washcloth. Sorting skills are developed unloading the silverware from the dishwasher, or sorting laundry. Vocabulary skills, taking directions, and working cooperatively are all developed listening to you as you help them master these skills.
However, I would even go a step further and suggest that using our daily tasks as the curriculum is MORE effective for teaching skills and ideas than designing a bunch of activities and games around a theme. There are several reasons for this.

Why Daily Tasks are Fulfilling to Children
I very firmly believe that everyone in this world wants to feel connected, to feel that they are competent, that they are contributing. When I think about my own life, all of the parts that feel the best revolve around me feeling connected, or feeling competent, or feeling like I’m contributing. In fact, that’s why I love working in early childhood, because I get to do all three of those things simultaneously.
Think about your own life for a moment: what have been the highlights? What times have you felt the most alive, the most vibrant? And think about it through this lens I’ve given you. Were you feeling connected, competent, or like you were contributing, during those times? If not those things, what were you feeling that made them especially great?
Now think about the young children in your life. We all know how important it is for children to be connected: lots of research has been done on the importance of attachment. And children spend enormous amounts of time practicing being competent. As they learn to walk, they fall over and get up again and again and again. As soon as they learn to talk, the phrase “me do dat” is often the most common to come out of their mouths. We often don’t let them try things for themselves as long as they’d wish, because we’re in a hurry, or we can see that they won’t be successful, but most of us understand and value their striving for competence. But how about the desire to contribute? That is not something that most of us think about in relation to young children, even though we can see how their faces light up when they are able to do so. Read this article from the science section of the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?_r=1 ). Studies are showing that children may be born with an innate desire to help.
As parents and caretakers in our culture, it’s easy for us to recognize the desire for connection, and we work very hard to develop it. In fact, we often work so hard at developing the connection piece of things that we sometimes unconsciously cut off our children’s abilities to be competent and to contribute: we love them so much that we want to do everything for them. Our own desires to be competent and to contribute to them leave no room for them to be able to contribute in a meaningful way.
By consciously setting Life as the platform for children children to learn skills and ideas, we are giving them the chance to develop true competence, as we do these tasks day after day after day. As their skills develop, they know that they are really contributing to the household. And your gratitude for their help (especially as they get better at it!) helps you connect.

My article goes on to look at how we can do this effectively, with practical tips and suggestions.  During the conference call I will show video footage of children helping me with laundry, washing dishes, brushing hair, and baking bread.

Storytelling with Toddlers

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I love telling stories to toddlers. Although I enjoy reading stories to toddlers as well, I find the act of telling a story much different from reading one. Reading a storybook is a nice cuddly activity, where children snuggle up with me on the couch and we look at the pictures together, and talk about what’s going on (I rarely read the words). This is a great activity to do when the kids are tired and grouchy, or when they’re wound up and need something to help them calm down. Telling a story, on the other hand, is a much different experience: I tell it from memory. I use the same words or very similar words each time. The children are watching me instead of looking at a picture. And these are the stories that show up in the children’s play again and again. They are alive for the children in a way that picturebook stories never are.

The age of the group determines where I tell the story: if I have a group of one- and two-year-olds, I’ll usually tell the story at the lunch table. I’ll wait until the older children (who usually eat much faster than the little ones) start to finish up. I’ll start a story, and the big ones sit and listen to me, while the little ones have all the time they need to eat as slowly as they do. Then we can all end the meal at the same time. For groups of older toddlers (two- and three-year-olds), I will tell simpler stories at the table, but save my real storytelling juice for either a puppet show (often done very simply on my lap) or acted out in our circle. Or I’ll start a new story at the table, and tell it pretty much every day for several weeks. Then I’ll take the story and do it as a puppet show or as a circle for several more weeks. I only change stories about once a month at the earliest; when I had only one- and two-year-olds, I would tell the same story for two to three months before changing.

If the idea of memorizing a story is scary for you, don’t worry: toddlers are VERY forgiving! The more times you tell the story, the more regular the words will get for you. I’ve often started telling a story just trying to remember it from my own childhood, and over several days or even a week the words and cadences will cement themselves together.  There are two types of stories that go over really well with toddlers. The first are nature stories, and the second are simple fairy tales.

Nature Stories
Nature stories are simple stories about woodland creatures that the children might find in their backyards.  In the fall I tell one of the animals telling what they’re grateful for (at Thanksgiving time), as winter comes I have a story of a mouse finding a warm home for the winter in a pumpkin. In the spring I tell the story of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. A wonderful source for these stories is Suzanne Down of Juniper Tree puppets. She taught the puppetry portion of my LifeWays training in Wisconsin, and now is the organizer of the Rocky Mountain LifeWays training in Boulder, CO. She is a wonderful resource! You can check out her website at http://junipertreepuppets.com/ . She puts out a newsletter periodically that always has one of these simple nature stories that’s appropriate for the season, with instructions on how to make simple table-puppets or lap-puppets if you wish to do it as a puppet show.

Simple Fairy Tales
The second type of story that toddlers love are fairy tales that have lots of repetition in them: The Three Little Pigs is my all-time most successful story, and is a great one to start with if you have never told a story before. You can even tell the Three Little Pigs for a month, then tell another story for a month, then tell the Three Little Pigs again. The children never tire of it; I am the only one who tires of it! Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a good one, but very long. If I can see that the children can’t sit all the way through, I will truncate the part where the bears go through each activity and discover the destruction that Goldilocks has wrought. However, if I do it as a puppet show they can almost always sit through it. If I have a bit of an older toddler crowd, I will tell The Elves and the Shoemaker after Christmas.

A good story to tell at the table, that even little ones can enjoy, is the Grimm’s tale Sweet Porridge. One year I had a little boy who was very demanding, so I changed the tale just a little bit so that the little girl must say to the pot “Please cook little pot, please cook.” Then when the little girl is gone, the mother forgets to say “please” when she’s trying to stop the pot, and it won’t stop. In my version she goes through various efforts to get the pot to stop before the little girl comes back and puts things to rights. The children LOVED it. Each time I say, “Do you think it stopped?” I look around expectantly and all of the children chorus, “No!”
Here is the version as I told it (or just google it for the original version; I know some people don’t like any changes made to fairy tales):

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived with her mother. They were very poor, and one day they had nothing left to eat. So the little girl went out into the forest to see what she could find. While she was there she came across an old woman who gave her a magical pot. All she had to do was put the pot on the stove and say, “Please cook little pot, please cook,” and it would cook sweet porridge which they could eat to their hearts’ content. When they were done, she would just say, “Please stop little pot, please stop,” and it would stop. The little girl thanked the old woman and ran home to her mother. “Look mother! We will never be hungry again,” she said, and so it was, for a long time.

One day, when the little girl had gone to town, the mother was hungry. She took out the pot and said, “Please cook little pot, please cook,” and she ate the sweet porridge to her heart’s content. But when she was done eating, she forgot the words. She said, “Stop little pot, stop!” But do you think the pot stopped? No! It began to boil over the sides of the pot and onto the stove. The mother said, “Little pot, stop right now!” But do you think the pot stopped? No! The porridge began to boil off the stove and across the kitchen floor. The mother said, “Pot, stop-stop-stop-stop!” But do you think the pot stopped? No! It boiled out the door of the house and started going down the path. By the time the little girl came home, the porridge had filled every house in the town but one! The little girl ran home and said, “Please stop little pot, please stop,” and it did. But anyone who wanted to leave their house and go through the woods had to eat their way through the porridge.

If you have any questions or comments about storytelling with toddlers, don’t hesitate to put it in the comments; others will surely appreciate it!

Warmly,
Miss Faith