Infant learning & development

Best day of the week: baby slept after each feed, or happily play with whatever I arranged, be it a play gym, an out of tone song that I sang or little games. Burp her after hearing she said 'eh', and gave a loud long burp.

Worst day of the week: sitting on my bed feeding, burping then feeding again, and she cried once I put her down. Keep crying & I couldn't find out any reasons, and stopped crying once her father or anyone hold her, cried again when passed back to me.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Besides feeding, sleeping and changing nappies, baby seems to have more awake time and will cry when she's bored and need someone to cuddle or play/talk with.

A friend gifted Your Baby and Toddler from Birth to 3 Years: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your Child's Development, has a step-by step guide to child's development from birth, shows some activities that I can play with my baby. Now she's 5 weeks, activities from the book that help develop her skills:

- Talk to him from different places in the room and watch how he tries to locate the sound

- Repeat the same song a few times, babies' memory is developing, although only short-term at the moment

- Tickle the palm of her hand and fingertips with anything soft or furry in texture

- Emotional & Social development, babies at this stage love any kind of interactions. Talking & responding (cooing) to her, smile with her.

- from Your Self-Confident Baby: How to Encourage Your Child's Natural Abilities— From the Very Start, talking to her and tell her what you're doing helps build her language skills and shows her respect. For example, tell her when you're changing her, "Now, I'm going to lift your legs up and take the nappy away...etc"

- Active movement from SPARC has free videos to show activities from infant up to pre-schoolers


Learning from birth - a good resource from Team Up


More games ideas:

Games to Play with Babies


Creative Play for Your Baby: Steiner Waldorf Expertise and Toy Projects for 3 Months-2 Years

Nursary Rhymes Lyrics


Baby gym resources:

MyGym
Jumping Beans, NZ
KindyRock

Play and learning for infants

Just been to a talk about play in early childhood, it presents a lot of ideas and set me thinking. It was interesting to find out something about child's play that maybe I need to change some mindset about playing & educating.

I've learned:

- Play as a response to life
- Play is a child's way to understand their surroundings, body, relationships, feeling and developing ideas
- A lot of toys may not be necessary for the child to learn
- Adults is better to let the children play amongst themselves rather than supervising
- Adults don't need to teach everytime the child pick up a toy, the children will learn by playing
- Play promotes creativity


Online infant game

Learning, playing & your newborn


Some ways to play & stimulate learning for the baby, as in the above website:

- Gentle caresses, sing with a soothing lullaby
- smile, poke out tongue, making different face expressions
- put baby on their tummy to strength neck/shoulder, always supervise & be ready to help.
- put on sothing music, hold the baby and sway to the tune