Category: 6 Loving Habits

Tell your child their food is an airplane and make the food fly around until they open wide so you can land it in their mouth. Make plane noises and talk about whether it is flying high, low, or in circles.

Hand your child safe objects or toys for their right hand and for their left. Then give them a third. How do they respond? Do they try to hold it with hands that are already full? Talk to them about what they might be thinking about holding objects.

Put one of your child’s socks on one of their hands, asking “Where’s your Hand?” How do they respond? Wave their hand? Look at it? Next, put it on the other hand. Do they respond in the same way or do anything differently?

A fun outside game is “Drop the Ball.” Give your child a safe object to hold onto and drop, like a ball or a crumbled piece of paper. If you pick it up, they will drop it again. “Down it falls. Up it comes.” Keep up the game with new objects!

When your child picks up something safe, encourage them to “Shake, Bang, and Roll!” How many different ways do they explore the object? Talk to them about what they’re doing, “You shook the rattle and made a sound.”

Sit on the floor holding your child on your knees. Gently move them up and down, side to side, and explain what’s going on. “Now you’re going up, up in the sky!” “Now you’re moving over to the door,” or “down, down to the ground.” Make up new ones as you go!

As you hold your child and look into each other’s eyes, make a silly face or sound. How do they respond? With twinkly eyes? A smile? A laugh? Try it again but do something different. This is the beginning of a lifetime of laughs to share together.

When you’re outside, ask your child, “Did you hear that?” each time you hear a sound. Imitate the sound out loud and make gestures to go along with it. Invite them to make the sound too.