Ideas to keep the playtime flowing at home. Here goes!
- Keep it Real
There is a reason that kids are attracted to the saucepan cupboard and the tupperware drawer. They love being a part of our real, adult world. Our everyday items are fascinating to children, and interacting with these teaches about the world. This being so, consider offering children the broken down wireless phone instead of buying the plastic toy faux phone. As long you’re safety conscious, err on the side of real (especially with gardening, cooking or carpentry tools!) for your kids.
- En Masse = interesting
Think of children’s resources in terms of creating collections. This is especially true for older infants, toddlers and preschoolers. But heck, humans of all ages enjoy collecting. A grouping of something (driftwood, marbles, a beloved variety of toy) can elevate the mundane into the marvelous. I’ve seen the lids from baby food jars turned into a collection. Shells and rocks are wonderful collectables, and the skills that children practice as they categorise, stack and sort are all useful pre-math thinking.
- Open Ended and Flexible
Another blessing of those collections of ordinary things is that they encourage more creative play than toys that are utterly prescriptive. A plastic petrol pump will probably only ever be a pretend petrol pump, but a solid wooden box can be a petrol pump, a cave, an island, a waka, an operating table. That driftwood collection could be used in limitless ways.
- Purses, Buckets and Bags
A great joy for toddlers is how their newfound walking skill gives them free hands. Whereas crawling used four limbs, this whole bipedal trip enables small people to carry things on the move. I think this must be one of the reasons that pretty much every toddler I’ve known (I’ve known hundreds!) has enjoyed toting stuff around. Wee buckets, baskets with handles, purses from the op shop – a few of those in strategic locations will bring hours of pleasure to your small person. Include some other dress ups (things little hands can manage, like hats) and access to a mirror and you’ve just opened up new universes to your kids.
- Extending Play with PROPS
Adding purses and buckets extends the collection play, adding dress ups and a mirror to the toting of collections extends the play even further. You probably already do this, but it’s worth a bit of deliberate effort. Try: adding toy cars to sand play, adding small toy people to play dough, using measuring cups in the bath. Clean the sand from the cars and the dough from the people and now add them to your block play. Use the furniture from the doll’s house in a new cardboard box bach. Mix it up!
- Storage
A quick word here on the value of thinking strategically about storage. Already, I’ve encouraged collections, trips to the op shop and re-using broken household stuff. Anyone else got their clutter radar pinging? Make some things freely available (open shelves, accessible toys) but you don’t need ALL the stuff out and available. Chaos is not conducive to play (or parental sanity!). Stash things out of sight: some kind of rotating system for toys is great, as are frequent purges of the stuff you don’t need anymore. Have a shelf or basket in most (all?) rooms to corral kids’s gear into, and I adore old fashioned bedside cabinets for their combo of cupboard, open cubby and useful surface. I have these in all rooms, not just bedrooms, and they can usually be found pretty inexpensively.
- Categorize, Consolidate,
While we’re on the subject, I’m an advocate of sorting kid’s toys upon occasion. It’s simple to add or remove props if you’ve got them consolidated. Easiest done when children are in bed or on an outing with Grandad. The time you’ll spend organising all the fingerpuppets into one abandoned pencil case and separating all the wooden blocks from the marble track is time you will gain back as your children play with existing stuff in a much more focussed way. I Promise.
- Re-Present
This is education speak for “Tidy Up”, but if you’re anything like me you are SICK TO THE BACK TEETH of tidying up. So try calling it “re-presenting the room” and see if it feels more palatable! It might seem counterintuitive to talk about tidying up in a Play story, but a slightly tidy-ish room is much easier to play in than one which is 100% chaos. Best if kids help, but still worthwhile if they don’t. This time.
- Get Down, part one
Adults are large, children are small, and furniture has not been part of human evolution for as long as relationships have. If families are to enjoy rich Play lives at home, adults have GOT to get down on the floor. Have an objective look at the way that different people engage with kids, or rather, the ways that children respond to different adults. Bet there’s a floor-time correlation. Adults who’ll loll on the carpet are far more interesting than those insistent on life lived at the kitchen table, or couch. Be a loller. No phone, no tablet. Just you.
- Get Down, part two
This time, encouraging getting down of a different sort. Like, in a James Brown kind of a way. Music, baby. The right soundtrack to your day can make a huge difference to the emotional climate in your house. Kitchen chores can become joyful and drawing with the kids just got infinitely more interesting when you set your online radio to “House Music Dance Fest”. Experiment with kitchen bench percussion as you wait for the toaster. I’m a nicer mother with reggae music or a wee bossa nova rhythm playing. Sad, but true.
- Move it!
Yes, by all means move it in a rhythmic way. Show your kids all your moves from the school disco, circa 1985. But this is a call for more movement in all sorts of ways. When the three year old asks you to be Baby Jaguar to her Diego, really go for it. Prowl and crawl and pounce. Throw a ball or frisbee as far or as high as you can. Practice handstands on the trampoline. Demonstrate to your children what it is to enjoy our miraculous bodies. Dr. Stuart Brown writes in his wonderful book Play: “One of the quickest ways to jump-start play is to do something physical. Just move.”.
- Loose Parts
Like the open-ended toys earlier, this looks at outdoor play with the same lens. OK, I love our trampoline and my kids adore the rope swing, but it can sometimes be a bit same, same. Immovable, unchanging gear. Source some old sheets and clothes pegs, invest in a couple of robust planks and a few strong wooden boxes (or score some old wooden speaker boxes from a garage sale, as I once did!) and let the everchanging world of obstacle courses and hut building open up.
- Change of Scene
If you’re all a bit stir crazy and nothing feels playful anymore, try a change of scene. Walk (skip!) to the letterbox, have a picnic in the bedroom, make a hut under the kitchen table. A location change – even if just for ten minutes – can work magic. That’s all.
- Playful, Musical Words (*no mess!)
There is a marvelously un-messy, un-tidy-uppy way to inject a bit more of a playful tone into your home, and that is by using your words. Yes, play word games (ask me and I’ll teach you to play Stink Pink), but also try crazy voices, silly accents and made up words. Sing your instructions, involve body percussion to time out the tooth brushing. Challenge your own vocab – are you “a bit confused” by your new cellphone or could you be “utterly discombobulated”? A great place to experiment here is with non-swearing almost-expletives. (“What the flapjack?” “Shiver me timbers!”).
- Remember – and FEEL.
This is kinda the most important one of all. We can’t really feel free adding playtime to our lives unless we’ve taken something of a soul journey into our own play past. Dr Stuart Brown urges us all to sit, remember, visualise something in the past that gave “the sense of unfettered pleasure, of time suspended, of total involvement, of wanting to do this thing again and again. Remember how that made you feel? Remember and feel that emotion and hold on to it, because that is what’s going to save you”.
These ideas, honestly explored, will add more play into your home. And it’ll be fantastic!
But I end by saying that all of us get a pass: you have permission to use your status as Adult of the Species to keep yourself sane. For me, that means I don’t have battery operated, noisy toys in the house. At all. Sorry. Can’t stand them. They go in the playhouse at the end of the path. My husband doesn’t mind them, but won’t tolerate messy play in the house. So we do that outside too. But that’s all! One thing each. Other than that, let your house (and your kids, and yourself!) be as playful as can be. Enjoy!
Originally published in OHbaby! Magazine, issue 29, Autumn 2015
Also available at:https://www.ohbaby.co.nz/under-5/play/15-inspirational-ways-to-play-with-your-child
