CreativePlay Plus: Ideas in Play and Child Development

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Halloween is a great time to have some fun combining a learning activity — shape identification — with one of the best-loved activities of the season – pumpkin carving!

Shape identification is an important skill for children to practice and learn, starting as early as nursery and pre-school.  When children recognize, identify, and become able to name different shapes, they are learning to tie words (such as “Square” or “Circle”) to mathematical concepts, forming a foundation for later learning in this area.

If you plan on integrating shape identification lessons into your evening of pumpkin carving, your best bet is to have more than one pumpkin on hand, because as with all creative play

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-related activities, you want to let your kids direct the activity themselves.  This will likely result in lots of fun and creative ideas, but also a great big mess, so it’s good to have more than one “subject” to carve on (with an adult’s help and safety knives, of course!).

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Starting out, let your kids draw on the pumpkin with a marker (you can always help them if they’re too young for drawing) in order to create whatever face or scene they want on the pumpkin.  Have them name the shapes they’re drawing as they go.  Then, go back and carve the shapes into the pumpkin, again having them give names to the shapes as the pumpkin carving progresses.

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Remember, this should be fun – don’t feel like the design on the pumpkin needs to look like anything in particular.  Pumpkin carving is an act of creativity for your kids, so let them do what they’d like with their pumpkin, even if it may not look exactly like something you’d generally want on your front porch!  In this case, shape identification skills are simply a helpful by-product of a wonderful opportunity to spend some quality time with your children.

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Of course, pumpkin carving isn’t the only way to help your children enhance their shape identification skills.  Try a 20-minute shape walk on one of these last beautiful days of fall, and help your kids get active while learning at the same time!

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The other day, a friend of mine gave me a book. The title of the book is not important.* What is important is the story behind the gift.

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My friend is a pediatrician and mother of three children. As it turns out, they are all star students. The oldest two are attending famous universities, and the youngest has been accepted to a top school as well. Not that getting into a great college is the only index of success, or even the best one. But it is notable that all three children have chosen to play the academic game, and all are finding success.

Being John Malkovich movies It often doesn’t work this way in families. There are families in which one child—often the oldest – is a great student, but the siblings who follow aren’t. They behave as if the “great student” role has been taken, and they choose different paths. One becomes “the artist,” another “the jock,” and perhaps another “the clown.” Of course, it is possible that these roles really are the right ones for each child. But in many cases I think that what drives children is a fear of competition with a sibling who has already staked out a strong position.

In fact, this dynamic did affect my friend’s family. Early on, the eldest son established himself as someone who loved reading and learning. His younger sister, looking up at this budding star, at first shied away from books. How could she hope to compete? And yet, my friend was able to help her daughter get past this fear and develop her own love of learning.

This key, my friend explained, was to find a book that her daughter would fall in love with, a book that was very different from any of the ones that her oldest son favored. The book my friend found for her daughter – and the one she gave to me – was a book of poems about colors and flowers. To a girl who loved pretty things, the appeal of the book was instant. Soon, the girl was reading more and more and writing her own poems. With the third child, it was a different spark that ignited the love of reading.

I’m telling you this story not because all girls need to love flowers, and not even because all children need to love books. I am telling it to you because it shows how a gifted parent finds the keys to unlock each child’s talents.

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Dumb Bell of the Yukon divx A family is an ecosystem, with each organism striving to find a niche. In a family with several children, it takes a tuned-in parent to give each child the space to follow his or her own light. Once that happens, neither competition – nor the fear of competition – controls the direction they grown in.

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“The Power to Play- From Trash to Treasure” is a traveling toy exhibit featuring toys handcrafted by children in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Power to Play exhibit recognizes that play is an essential part of a healthy childhood and appreciates the creativity and resourcefulness of children in developing countries.

If you’re unable to visit the exhibition in person I highly recommend browsing the Childfund International* website and reading about the featured children. You’ll experience firsthand how each child made their toy and the pride and joy they felt through their creation.  Perhaps your child will be inspired to make their own toy!  Or maybe they will have fun learning to make a toy made by a child from across the world!

We would love to hear how your child creates toys. What ways have you noticed your child recycling materials to make a new toy?

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The “The Power to Play- From Trash to Treasure” is currently in Los Angeles, California at The Museum of Tolerance through December 31, 2009 and at the Breman Museum in Atlanta, Georgia October 18, 2009-January 10, 2010.

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*Childfund International is an organization inspire d by the potential in all children and seeks to support children not only to survive but to thrive.

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With Halloween “creep”-ing up fast, it’s a great time to let your kids’ imaginations run wild with their Halloween costumes.  Rather than purchasing store-bought costumes off the rack, why not spend some time with your kids brainstorming different ideas for homemade Halloween costumes?  You don’t have to be the Queen or King of Crafting to make something wonderful at home, and it’s a great way to involve your kids in the creation of their own Halloween costumes.  Kaboose.com has some excellent directions on how to make your own homemade Halloween costumes

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Star Trek: Insurrection video that any kid (and parent!) is sure to love.  Definitely take some time to check out the more unusual costume ideas on the site, such as the Sunny Sky

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and Funny Food costumes.

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Once you have the costume dilemma under control, and you’ve successfully navigated yet another Halloween night, you may find yourself wondering what to do with the costumes you’ve made.  Well, don’t forget to repurpose those costumes by putting them away in your dress-up box!  Kids love costumes no matter what the reason or the season, so recycling old costumes for later creative play is a great way to make sure all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste.  Although the general guidelines for creative play don’t generally endorse the use of full costumes for creative playtime, you’ll be amazed at how pieces and parts of what you’ve made for Halloween finds new life in your kids’ imagination later on.  A pirate sword could become a walking stick, or a set of angel wings the perfect way to lift a butterfly off the ground.  The beauty of creative play is that truly, anything is possible!

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Great Bear Rainforest rip The choice between a play-based preschool and academic preschool can be agonizing for any parent. Ultimately, preschool should be a place where a love for learning is cultivated and children are given experiences to enhance their executive functioning skills (i.e. self control and attention skills). Executive functions is a psychological term used to describe the cognitive process that is involved in planning and monitoring what we attend to and what we do (“execute”) with this input.

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Recently, the New York Times The Stand film printed an article highlighting an empirically based preschool and kindergarten program, Tools of the Mind. One of the fundamental aspects of the Tools of the Mind program is its use of mature pretend play to develop self-regulation abilities while also preparing children academically for school.

“The ultimate goal of Tools of the Mind is not emotional or physical self-regulation; it is cognitive self-regulation — not the ability to avoid grabbing a toy from the kid next to you (though that’s an important first step), but the much more subtle ability to avoid falling for a deceptively attractive wrong answer on a test or to concentrate on an arduous mental task.”

So what is mature pretend play?

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Children participating in Tools of the Mind programs are asked to create a play plan at the start of each day. Children decide what characters they would like to play and what they would like to do. They record their plan by drawing a picture of themselves doing the action and then underneath they write “I am going to (action)” or draw squiggly lines to indicate each word. These play plans are designed to motivate children to become fully absorbed in the activity. This intense play work also allows children to practice using their attention systems. Most importantly, this mature pretend play help children take responsibility for their learning and reinforce habits of self-control.

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One of the primary benefits of creative play is the development of specific important skills in children.  However, the introduction of so many narrowly-focused toys and games since the 1950s has actually shown to impede the growth of children’s cognitive abilities, most specifically in an area called executive function.  This is truly one of the most important skill sets children can acquire during their formative years. голова болит секс голова болит секс

Executive functions

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are much like other cognitive skills in that they must be learned. These skills include planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, and self regulation. However, the way executive functions develop is a bit more complex than with other learned abilities. Research is increasingly showing the way kids play now, versus how they played earlier in the century (directed play versus creative play), could very well be the leading cause of the overall decrease in executive functioning in children.

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Because poor executive function is associated with negative outcomes such as high drop-out rates, drug use, and crime, getting back to a style of play that encourages the development of these “higher skills” is extremely important for putting kids on the right track early in life.  One of the best ways to do this is through the introduction of creative play early and often.

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Although play had been relegated to the margins of childhood development training during the last part of the century in large part to the emphasis on standardized testing, a push from researchers in the area of creative play has put it back in the spotlight as an invaluable tool, both in the classroom, and at home.  As these researchers continue to push forward, creative play will likely be even more widely accepted as a natural way to teach kids the skills they need in order to succeed both now, and later in life.

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