Learning Through Play: September Carnival of Natural Parenting

September 14th, 2010 by Dionna | 14 Comments
Posted in Carnival and Special Series, Carnival of Natural Parenting, Children, Eclectic Learning, Gentle Discipline Ideas, Successes, and Suggestions, Gentle/Positive Discipline, Infants, natural parenting, Preschoolers, Respond with Sensitivity, Toddlers

Welcome to the September Carnival of Natural Parenting: We’re all home schoolers

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how their children learn at home as a natural part of their day. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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With our toddler-almost-preschooler, our learning at home experiences can be summed up with one word:

play

“For adults, play means leisure, but for children, play is more like their job. Unlike many of us adults, they usually love their work and seldom want a day off. Play is also children’s main way of communicating, of experimenting, and of learning.”¹

Let’s look at some of the many things we can learn through play.

Social Skills

*Taking Turns and Cooperation: Parents model turn-taking by playfully cooing back and forth with their one-month-old baby. As children get older, turn-taking games include things like peek-a-boo, catch, tag, and simple board games. Adults can also model taking turns with toys with their toddlers and preschoolers. As children get older and start playing with others (instead of the more side-by-side play of toddlers), playtime is full of rich opportunities to learn cooperation – building together, engaging in dramatic play with others, cleaning up a play space for a new activity, etc.

*Communication: Playtime with others teaches children how to listen carefully, how to speak effectively, how to read body language and nonverbal cues, how to gauge others’ emotions, and how to respect personal space.

*Social Norms and Manners: Playful interactions offer many opportunities to model manners (“thank you for handing me the chalk,” “can I have a turn please?”), internalize societal rules (think of things like the “red light/green light” game), and practice social norms (politely “introducing” yourself to the various dolls sitting around the table).

Physical Skills

*Gross Motor Skills: Gross motor skills include things like balance, jumping, reaching – any game that gets kids up and moving (chase, Simon Says, dancing, walking around while playing dress-up, moving about the playground) simultaneously helps improve their coordination and gross motor skills.

*Fine Motor Skills: Many of kids’ favorite quiet time activities are wonderful ways to develop fine motor skills – stringing beads, playing with money, art, stickers, or playdough.²

Traditional “Educational” Subjects

*Math: Simple dice games not only teach numbers and addition, but the games work on important social skills (like taking turns and manners) and finding patterns on the dice helps develop reading skills. Building a tower of blocks gives us an opportunity to practice counting. Pretending to be astronauts lets us practice counting backwards.

*Reading: Games like Memory help children develop visual memory skills, which are important when learning abstract concepts, such as letters. Other toys and games also help develop beginning reading skills – like Candyland’s color cards. Tracking objects visually is also a step on the road to reading, so playing with a ball, finding “hidden pictures,” and even playing certain video games can help children develop this skill.

*Science: Multiple trips down the slide can provide a lesson about friction. Picking up stones in the backyard turns into lessons about insects and animal classifications. An evening of cooking dinner gives little ones lessons in math (measuring), reading (following a recipe), and science (the state of matter and how it can combine/change). An evening in the bath tub can  also be an evening learning about density, water displacement, and evaporation.³

Life Skills

*Role-play: Much of a child’s creative play is “practicing” adult roles: playing house, playing grocery store, driving a toy car, going to work. Children model what we do through imaginative play, and in the process, they are learning how the world works and how they fit into it.

*Discipline: We can even use play when we discipline our children. Discipline, which means “to teach” (from the Latin word disciplinare), does not need to be synonymous with punishment. We can use laughter and connection to end struggles that we once reacted to with yelling or other harsh forms of discipline.

Are you having battles with your children over bedtime? Play bedtime. Having battles over dessert? Play dinnertime. It doesn’t really matter if you play a mean mother who says no dessert, or if you play an absurdly nice mother who says “We’re having ice cream for dinner tonight.” Whatever makes them laugh. Having trouble with back talk? Pick up two dolls, and have one talk back to the other. You’ll have fun imitating children’s obnoxious behavior and making up snappy comebacks. Children will think it’s a riot.⁴

If you want to incorporate more play into your parenting, join us for an online book discussion about Lawrence Cohen’s #1 parenting book, Playful Parenting. You still have time to read along with us – come back Monday, September 20 to discuss the first three chapters with other parents!

Here’s the best thing about learning with young children: it should be fun. If you’re not having fun, you probably need to practice playing.

How is your child’s play doubling as a teacher?

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Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be updated September 14 with all the carnival links.)

• A is for Apple {But right now it’s more fun to pick apples!} — Kat at Loving {Almost} Every Moment has a four-year-old who wisely knows she must forgo the worksheets for now and do things with her mother if she’s going to learn.
• Baby Talks — Amy at Anktangle talks, talks, talks all day long to her preverbal baby, about simple things and complexities. (@anktangle)
• Baby University: Little Man, My Teacher — The ArtsyMama shares how her relaxed and patient “teaching” at home resulted in a confident little one when she returned to work.
• Creating a Sensory Garden — A sensory garden has given Marita at Stuff With Thing and her girls practice in math, science, budgeting, fine motor skills, and more. (@leechbabe)
• Despite the Big Yellow Bus — Seonaid at The Practical Dilettante has surprised many friends by sending her kids off to mainstream schooling — but their learning doesn’t stop there. (@seonaid_lee)
• Down on the Farm — Megan at Purple Dancing Dhalias describes the multitude of skills her children learn by homeschooling on a farm.
• Early Childhood Education — First Do No Harm — Laura at Laura’s Blog provides an incredible list of tips to facilitate learning at home.
• Education Starts At Home — Luschka at Diary of a First Child was happy to realize that learning at home isn’t limited to older children. (@lvano)
• Every Day Is A School Day — Summer at Finding Summer lists the ways her family learns in this poem of a post. (@summerminor)
• hands on — the grumbles at grumbles and grunts read her little one Sherlock Holmes in utero. She’ll continue to make learning fun now that he’s on this side of the womb. (@thegrumbles)
• Have a Happy Heart — Erica at ChildOrganics has days of poop on the couch and oatmeal down the pants when sending her children to school seems like the perfect solution — until she regains her perspective. (@childorganics)
• Home Sweet Home Schooling — Check out CurlyMonkey’s Blog for a photo montage of how her kids are learning anatomy, architecture, and more — all at home. (@curlymonkey_)
• Homeschooling — My Needs? — Do you homeschool for the kids, or do you do it for you? Read some thoughts from Home Grown Families. (@momtosprouts)
• Homeschooling: A Way of Life — Kimberly at Homeschooling in Nova Scotia has children who meet learning with enthusiasm and are becoming self-sufficient at a young age. (@UsborneBooksCB)
• How We Homeschooled — Deb at Living Montessori Now details in retrospect how her two lifelong learners spent their homeschooling years. (@DebChitwood)
• Learning at Home With a Preschooler and Toddler — Need some inspiration? Michelle at The Parent Vortex shares her tips and resources for lifelong learning. (@TheParentVortex)
• Learning at Home: Are We All Homeschoolers? — Kristin at Intrepid Murmurings incorporates homeschool ideas even though she plans to send her kids to school. (@sunfrog)
• Learning From Life — Mamapoekie at Authentic Parenting doesn’t even have to think about how her daughter learns. She just does it. (@mamapoekie)

• Learning Through Play — What better way to learn at home than through play? Dionna at Code Name: Mama lists the many ways children learn through play, whether they know it or not. (@CodeNameMama)
• Learning With Savoury Pikelets — Deb at Science@Home breaks down how cooking facilitates learning. (@ScienceMum)
• Lessons Learned by Bowling (Yes, Bowling) — What life lessons can you learn from bowling? Ask Jessica from This is Worthwhile. (@tisworthwhile)
• Life is learning, learning is life. — Kristin, guest posting at Janet Fraser — Where birth and feminism intersect, defends the truth that children are hardwired to learn. (@JoyousLearning)
• life learning… — Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children found that structured schooling is about teaching, whereas unschooling is about learning, and her family resonated with the latter.
• Live to Learn Together — RealMommy at True Confessions of a Real Mommy knows that children learn in all different styles, so only one-on-one attention can do the trick.
• Natural Parenting and the Working Mom — Jenny from Chronicles of a Nursing Mom shares how natural parenting in the Philippines — and learning at home — includes “yayas” (nannies). (@crazydigger)
• Not Back to School: How We Learn at Home — Denise at This Holistic Life has learned to describe what unschooling is, rather than what it isn’t.
• Our Learning Curve — Andrea of Ella-Bean & Co. has a special bookshelf set up where her daughter can explore the world on her own terms.
• School at Our House — Where is learning happening at Kellie at Our Mindful Life’s house? It is pouring all over the floor. It is digging down deep in the earth. It is everywhere!
• Schooling Three Little Piggies — Despite the mess and the chaos, Melissa at White Noise lets her children into the kitchen.
• SuperMom versus The Comic Books of Doom! — Mommy Soup at Cream of Mommy Soup realized that if “getting the kids to read” was the goal, it didn’t matter what the kids read. (@mommysoup)
• The joy of learning at home — Heather at Life, Gluten Free has a daughter who sees magic in the stars and understands the honeybees. (@lifeglutenfree)
• those who can’t teach — Do you need a superiority complex to homeschool? Stefanie at Very, Very Fine wonders.
• Too lazy to unschool? — If unschoolers aren’t lazy, Lauren at Hobo Mama wonders if she’s too lazy to live her dream of free-form education. (@Hobo_Mama)
• Unschooling the School of Me — Rachael at The Variegated Life considers what she’s teaching her son about work as a work-at-home mother — and the extreme work ethic she doesn’t want him to emulate. (@RachaelNevins)
• What We Do All Day — Alison at BluebirdMama discovered that it’s easier than she thought it would be to quantify how her child learns all day. (@childbearing)
• Who taught that kid ‘exoskeleton’? — Nervous about how you will facilitate learning at home? Don’t be – they will absorb things on their own! Joni Rae at Tales of a Kitchen Witch Momma shares her story. (@kitchenwitch)

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