6 Important Steps To Prepare A Toddler For Daycare

The transition of a toddler from home to daycare or playgroup or preschool is often dreaded. I too was very skeptical as to how my 17 months old son will fare in this transition of home to a two hours daycare session. But in just seven days, he was happily settled in there, which includes two days of being sick!

I will share below how we handled this transition in the calmest way I could have imagined.

Self-Calming Phase By Positive Affirmations

I knew the first thing I should do is to calm myself and be confident of the fact that he will do great. So months before we were supposed to enroll him, I slept with these positive affirmations. It is a part of neurolinguistic programming, the affirmations start getting into your subconscious mind. Here is what I affirmed. (A here means his name initials)

• A is adjusting very beautifully in the daycare
• A is happy in daycare
• A is cooperating with mumma in this transition

Reading Relevant Books To The Child

After I got confident of the transition, I started to hunt for some books that will explain how a daycare/preschool/playgroup is so much fun! A just LOVES books so I thought it couldn't be better if I try to inculcate love for daycare/playgroup by reading him books. Luckily I found such books soon. I read these books to him every day with a highly animated voice so that he understood the essence of the stories more. He started loving this book 'Goat Goes To Playgroup' and every day in our reading sessions, he would take out this book & ask me to read. This stage was a success again. I was delighted to see he was happy with the term & concept of playgroup.

Sleep Talk

Two weeks before we were supposed to start the daycare, I started giving him sleep talk, I learnt about sleep talk in ISP course. In sleep talk, after the child is asleep, you are supposed to say positive present tense sentences for the behavior or solution you want. This again works on the principle that the affirmations go into the subconscious of the child. I started saying the same affirmations to A that I told to myself.

Packing His Favourite Toys In His Favorite Bag

My husband had got his beautiful bag in the shape of a car from Hong Kong. His love for cars & other vehicles is IMMENSE. So my husband didn't think twice before buying this bag for him, though it was a little pricey, talk about being an indulgent parent ;) So I packed some of his favourite stuff like auto, shark, pigeon and few of his favourite books so that he feels something familiar in the otherwise unfamiliar daycare surroundings. He was super happy carrying his bag on the first day to the daycare, a success again. Babysteps :)

Making The Daycare Space Familiar

The more familiar I could make this new space for A, the better he would adjust. So the first day, I clicked some pics of A playing with the see-saw, slides, toys and the teachers/caretakers there. I used to show these pics to him at home and tell him their names & tell him that this is your playgroup, you have lots of fun there with friends. He started to say aunty-aunty at home whenever I mentioned playgroup. He made a good connection with an aunty there.

I stayed with him in the play area of their premises for three days for some time and played with him while he made friends with the teachers and caregivers there. Then I would leave him there, come downstairs & wait till he was ready to go back home. He cried initially & it felt terrible! I felt I'm being too selfish but I told myself this is not going to happen every day & I needed to be strong. I gave him heart to heart thoughts while waiting for him downstairs to be calm & happy there, and that mumma will get you back in some time. I think it helped too. Everyday A jumped out of excitement when I told him we are going to playgroup, pick up his car bag and try to open the main door of our house to go out. I felt happy for the fact that he wasn't dreading his time at playgroup.

No Sneaking Away

After three days, I didn't go to the play area to leave him. I let the aunty take him upstairs so that he understands mumma is not supposed to go to the play area. The IMPORTANT point here is I never sneaked away leaving him with the caregivers. I honestly told him that you will be having lots of fun with your friends, aunty and mam, while mumma does some office work. So go & enjoy your time. Sneaking away behind the child's back only increases the anxiety & you lose the trust. The child might get adjusted but that trauma of mumma getting disappeared might be with him for long. Children understand everything, so it's better to convey the reality to them, they do understand. By the sixth day, A was playing happily with the toys, with his friends & aunty. I felt at the top of the world!!! A huge sigh of relief as he got adjusted.

The seventh day, A went towards aunty on his own, even had a banana in the playgroup. What more can I ask for!

I think it is not just the working moms (office goers) who need a daycare. Even SAHM or WFH moms need it. My reasons for sending him to daycare were -

1. I wanted few hours for myself to breathe & to do something for my own self. It's not being selfish but a rejuvenation that I need, to be able to sustain happily whole day running behind my toddler & to be able to handle the difficult moments that any toddler throws quite regularly.
2. We are a nuclear family and I wanted A to socialize a bit more. He anyways gets bored at home with seeing just his mom whole day, a social interaction never hurts.

I hope these tips will help you when you send your child to a daycare or playgroup or preschool. Do let me know what else worked for you :)

Happy Parenting!

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Montessori Inspired Busy Bag Ideas For Toddlers (VLOG)

Diwali vacation is approaching, lots of travel planned & fearing how to keep your toddler engaged during the travel?

Here are some Montessori inspired busy bag ideas that I compiled for my then 17 months old son. We took this busy bag to our vacation & we never had a difficult moment during air & road travel & in the hotel room! 

Watch the video to get some ideas for your busy bag!

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Montessori Inspired Early Learning Activities For Toddlers - Rainy Splash (VLOG)

It's time to share my Montessori inspired shelf activities again that I had set up for my then 17 months old son. It was rainy season, so I added a splash of rain theme activities too. It has activities for language building, fine motor skills, matching, sorting etc. A lot of fun!

Hope you enjoy them! Here is the video. And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel HERE.

Thanks for watching. Share away if you liked it :)

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Do not forget to follow "The K Junction" on Facebook page & closed Facebook group, Twitter and Instagram for day to day updates that might not always find a place on this blog. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to know more about our early learning journey, DIY & Montessori & Waldorf inspired activities for kids, kids books & toys reviews and much more!

Hope to see you around. Happy Parenting!

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What Can Vehicle Miniatures Teach A Child?

What a child can learn from free play is immense. Even more interesting is the way you can tap into the cues & interests of your child & drive learning through these interests. The child will be interested & enthusiastic in such learning activities. Read on how & what my son learnt, and is still learning following his love for vehicles!

My son who is 18 months old right now, is super duper fond of vehicles of any kind. When I realized this craze months back, I started hunting for miniatures of various vehicles. I did not want to stick to the routine cars, moreover wanted to encash this craze & encourage some learning. 

I finally bought a lot of vehicle miniatures like truck, bus, tempo, auto, bike, scooter, train, engine, fire engine, ambulance, boat, aeroplane, helicopter, tractor and some construction vehicles like dumper truck, digger, mobile crane, cement mixer truck, bulldozer, road roller and what not. This was not a one day purchase obviously. Whenever I found a deal somewhere, online or local market, I hoarded this stuff. Also, I did not give him all the vehicles in one go. It is overwhelming for the child. I looked for his cues, for example, there were days he got super excited seeing an auto. So I gave him the auto miniature & he would play with it endlessly, even sleep holding it. It was so amazing to see him so engaged with that little auto. Same happened for tempo (goods carrier in India), bus, truck etc.

There is a construction going on just in front of our place, so he used to stand at the balcony & watch those construction vehicles work with great interest. That was the time I pulled out his construction toy vehicles from the almirah & gave him to play! He would hold the cement mixer in one hand & watch the real cement mixer work on the construction site for long.

"Play is child's work." ~ Maria Montessori

I did not know how enriching it is to play with these miniatures before I actually saw my son playing with them! I am sharing how his love for vehicles facilitated in so much learning for him, I am sure I have missed a lot more points to enumerate but nevertheless!

• Gross Motor Skills - See his large muscles at work while making a vehicle move. By the way, I made this maroon & yellow parking lot with a ramp for him from an old Flipkart box. All his vehicles were being dumped in a box, they certainly needed a better home ;) 

• Fine Motor Skills while holding & manipulating the vehicles

• Vocabulary Building - Learning about names of vehicles & parts of the vehicles in a hands-on way like wheels, headlights, tail & wings of an aeroplane, blades of a helicopter etc. In the picture below, I was having my lunch & he wanted my attention. So I asked him to get me one vehicle at a time from another room. I asked him, "please get me the dumper truck", and he would get me the dumper truck. So this huge collection you see below, he brought to me rightly according to the vehicle's name. This was at around 15 months if I remember correctly. In another picture below, he is trying to tell me where are the wings, jet engine & tail of an aeroplane

• Counting the wheels in a 2 wheeler, 3 wheeler & 4 wheeler. 
• Learning Shapes - wheel is a circle, window is a rectangle, so on & so forth
• Enhancing Imagination & Making Connections - My son would play for 15 minutes at a stretch with his vehicles (which is a LOT of time considering the super short attention span of babies & toddlers). I am sure in his mind he is doing some kind of imagination & role play. Once he starts talking more, I may get to know what went in his mind while playing with his vehicles all this while. Moreover, seeing a real world vehicle & a toy vehicle side by side helps a child to make connections in his brain, helps to make one to one correspondence, which is a pre-math skill.

• Related Book Reading - I invested in books that were based on vehicles, picture books, story books, sound books, lift the flap books & books of all kinds. He already loves reading books. And books with his favourite vehicles, all the more interested! He matches his toy vehicles with the pictures in the books every now & then. By reading books, he also gets to know more details about how these vehicles work. He LOVES these vehicle-based books! Sharing just a few of them that I already had pics of (along with other non-vehicle titles too). There are a whole bunch of more of such books inside!

• Visual Discrimination - Based on his interest, I made some DIY activities for him to take his interest on a different level & he LOVED them too! These are some color, shape & vehicle matching activities that he started doing successfully from 15 months onwards.

Printable courtesy - Welcome To Mommyhood

• Peeling Off Stickers - I got him puffy foam stickers of cars to peel off. Using stickers is a very good fine motor skill. He loved playing with them too! This sticker sheet had logos of some car brands & he would ask again & again what they are. I told him these are logos & he could remember the names & pointed to the right logo when I asked! This further gave way to learning of logos. We used to go to our society garden every evening & he would point each & every car & ask for the logo name. Now he recognizes some 7-8 logos on paper & on the vehicles on the road too. While in the car, he starts shouting Tata Tata after seeing a Tata bus on the road!

• Perceiving Finer Sounds - My son now knows what sounds some vehicles like aeroplane, fighter plane, train, tempo, truck, car reverse horn etc make. In the middle of anything, when he is playing or reading or roaming around, whenever he hears these sounds (amidst all the noise, believe me!), he stops for a moment, points his fingers to the direction of the sound, says car or whatever is the name, if he can utter that word, smiles, does an eye to eye contact with me or his father, and goes back to his work again! Many times, we do not manage to hear the sound until he tells us to listen & acknowledge! 

• Hands-On Learning & 3D to 2D Matching - Once a 3D object picture is stored successfully in children's brain, it is very easy for them to relate to their 2D counterparts. If we teach vehicles just from the books, they would see a 2D view of it, and would not know how it looks from other angles. They will tend to store a limited view of that vehicle in their brain. We also did shadow matching activity of vehicles & to my surprise, he could do it very easily! Also, anything that anyone can actually experience (hands-on), rather than just read, goes into the long term memory. 

I will link up all the books, toys & puzzles we have related to vehicles in a separate post! For now, you can search them on Amazon & Flipkart.

I also wanted to share a beautiful vehicle set that I got as a gratitude gift from Creative Express because I reviewed their awesome concept calenders. These vehicles are sturdy enough & lovely to play with :)

Next, we plan to do 2 part, 3 part & eventually jigsaw puzzles based on vehicles! We will also do some vehicle painting and sorting of vehicles based on where they go - land, air & water. Later on we will attempt pre-writing work with small vehicles, like tracing the shapes or different kinds of lines using vehicles.

Do you have more suggestions as to how one can use vehicles? I would love to hear. I would also love to know what all activities you did with your child using vehicles :) Do share in comments!

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How Free Play Can Bring In Creativity And Order

I have read & experienced myself how important is free play for a child. Free play can bring out the most exciting moments & experiences I bet. I have seen them myself many times. I have seen him doing many things on his own while free play which otherwise he might not do when I sit with him or when I tell him to do.

Today one more exciting thing happened.

I have got this shape & color sorter game for him. I have done a quick product review of it which I will link it up soon on my YouTube channel. Meanwhile don't forget to subscribe to my channel at http://www.youtube.com/kg141083

So this is what happened today -

I give him this shape sorter game for free play.

He independently puts all stars in one rod without me telling or prompting him anything.

After that he puts all the octagons on top of stars. 

Of all the shapes in this set, he chose to sort stars & octagons!?! To give a background, he already knows shapes like circle, square, rectangle, hexagon, triangle, crescent, star, heart. He was able to point to them when asked at around 14 months if I remember correctly.

Then he puts back all 64 shapes back in the box & closes the box. Everything without me prompting anything & on his own. 

This shapes set contains 8 pieces each of triangle, circle, rectangle, star, pentagon, octagon, diamond & square. Total 64 pieces.

A is 17 months right now and it isn't easy to dig out all the stars & all the octagons from 64 pieces, and to distinguish between pentagon & octagon, all the more. 

I was really amazed to see this free play exercise & a sense of order he adhered to, of putting his stuff back to its place. And did I tell you this is an amazing fine motor skill development activity? :)

Kids surprise us, right?

Have you seen something magical while your child played on his/her own? Please do share in comments :) 

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Montessori Inspired Rainy Season Activity With My Toddler

We did a rainy season activity to celebrate the rains. He finds umbrella fascinating these days so umbrella it was for the activity. At 17 months, he knows shapes & we are working on colors. So I did this quick diy activity to reinforce shapes & to learn colors. I drew four umbrellas freehand & colored them with sketchpen leaving out shapes in white. And I cut out those shapes from cardboard (amazon packing material zindabaad) to match with umbrella shapes. I also took out colored popsicle sticks to match with colored umbrellas. The umbrella paper was then kept in transparent plastic leaf

A had fun doing this activity. Costed me not more than 30 bucks may be?

What did you do in rainy season with your kid, do share?

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Do not forget to follow "The K Junction" on Facebook page & closed Facebook group, Twitter and Instagram for day to day updates that might not always find a place on this blog. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to know more about our early learning journey, DIY & Montessori & Waldorf inspired activities for kids, kids books & toys reviews and much more!

Hope to see you around. Happy Parenting!

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My Routine With My 17 Months Old Toddler

One of my mommy friends asked me what is my routine with my 17 months old A. I thought a blog post answer would be better so that many other moms might benefit from it. This is a very broad level routine, it changes here & there almost every other day ;)

8.30 am or 9 am - A wakes up. He breast feeds if he wants to after waking up. Immediately, I remove his night diaper & make him on potty seat. Usually I'm lucky. Then I give him bath & get him ready.

He plays around freely with his vehicles or blocks or Montessori shelf or ride on car or balls etc. Or if he wants me to read books, I do so. He is crazy for books. If he wants me to read to him & I'm busy in something else, he will make sure I leave everything else & attend him. Many times he involves me in his play. I offer him breakfast that I eat, like poha or upma or vermicelli or dosa etc. He usually doesn't eat much but happily gulps down some cow's milk. All day long, I take him to the loo every 30-40 minutes. We are toilet training!

12 noon - my domestic help/babysitter arrives & she plays with A for some time, though he needs mumma in front of him all the time. She feeds him lunch at around 12.30 pm. If I'm lucky, I steal around 30 minutes to do tasks on laptop. A is super mobile now & follows me everywhere  so I rarely can do anything alone & with concentration :D

1.30 pm or 2 pm - A takes his nap, I nurse & pat him to sleep. Then I eat my lunch, do household chores, some social networking etc. Then depending on my mood & capability, I either read or prepare early learning activities for him or do some music or remaining chores. If I'm tired, I sleep too. If I'm lucky he sleeps at a stretch for an hour without demanding breastmilk. If he demands, he feeds & goes back to sleep too. Usually he naps for around 2 hours.

4 pm - A wakes up, breastfeeds compulsorily. Again I take him toilet just after waking up. We play together from whatever he wants or read books or gaze out from balcony. I offer him evening snacks, mainly fruits & cow's milk.

6 pm - outdoor time. We go to society garden downstairs. He enjoys outdoors a lot. We recognize logos of cars, see cats & dogs, spot the moon, play with ride ons, play in the rains etc. Approximately in an hour or so, we come back home. He breastfeeds if in a mood.

7 pm - Again we play together or read together.

8.30 pm - A's dad returns from office. They play & I cook dinner. We all have dinner in sometime & that's the only time the TV is on for 30 minutes. No screen time other than this for A, except for 5 minutes laptop screen time for an educational CD. A plays freely after dinner with whatever he likes, mainly vehicles, boys & vehicles have some inbuilt bonding ;)

10 pm - I give him cow's milk so that his tummy is full before he sleeps. Finally he goes to bed at around 11 pm. I know it's late but he doesn't leave his dad & wants to play play & play with him. I drag him to bed literally :) After that, it's my me-time. I read, do social networking or write the blog posts. Before I sleep, I give Reiki to A & myself.

So that's how our routine looks like these days! Do let me know what works & what not in your case :)

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