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Jun 15, 2020: Covid-19 has shaken up the world and it has changed the lives of young children and their parents, especially those like us who deeply believe in nature play and in immersive outdoor experiences. While kindergartens have re-opened in some countries, it is unlikely that they’ll return to pre-Covid state anytime soon.
How do we meaningfully engage our kids when locked down at home? We, at Roobaroo, are putting down ideas from across the Web and lessons learnt from our own experiences with playgroups and working with our child at home in the past few months. Most of our ideas apply to pre-schoolers, but some may apply to older kids as well. We divide these ideas into five broad themes:
1. Space. Indoors or outdoors, kids need space to move. And this becomes particularly important in the Covid era, when a walk in a park, even if allowed for kids, cannot happen with the ease that it used to earlier. Home is the safest place in these times, and the first thing we need to do is to make this place as free and as open for kids to move around in as possible. Un-furnish your home aggressively (although do not make it completely devoid of opportunities to climb and jump!) Allocate a larger-than-usual chunk of floor area to be kids-accessible. And make it as easy for kids to run at home as possible. At the same time, it is important for us, parents, to engage kids in activities that make them use that space and actually move. A stay-at-home child needs to be able to do more physical work at home than he/she normally would and the adult has to guide this. In our experience in the last 3 months, we have found that kids can be made to walk, run, climb and dance, at home for long periods of time and all these movements are important, from the point of view of their overall growth.
2. Chores. This is something that many parents of young children already practice but it becomes all the more pertinent in the current times, given that help at home is limited and kids’ demands are increased when stuck at home. It’s unreasonable to expect that our household chores will happen at the same pace with and without a young child around, but if we work with patience, their help will outweigh the disruption they create in household work.
Working on household chores has the desirable effect of improving their gross and fine motor skills and also improves their ability to form relationships in the long run. Our experience suggests that children as young as 2.5 can be engaged in household chores around cooking (peeling, grating, chapati making, baking), snack preps (peeling/deseeding/chopping fruits and juice-making), cleaning and other chores (drying/folding clothes) in a way that it benefits the child and at the same time gets the work done. Gardening is one of the best ways to keep small children engaged and even for those locked up in apartments, keeping a few gardening supplies (a few pots, mud, shovels) at home will bring a lot of joy, and work for your child and could even get you to reap a real harvest! (We did, with chillies and tomatoes, this summer.)
3. (Open-ended) activities. Research shows that free play and pretend play in groups has immense benefits for young children. Unfortunately, the possibilities for this are limited in the Covid era. As parents, we need to make an effort to engage our kids in activities in a way that it compensates for at least some of their deprivation of free play. We strongly believe that activities for children should be designed to trigger creativity and imagination, rather than build skills or intelligence. A few guiding principles to keep in mind:
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Avoid goals: An activity for a small child does not need to have a goal. In fact, not having a goal may set the ground better for creativity to surface.
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Minimise props: If you paint with the child, give him very few colours, simple tools (fingers and sponge trump brushes) and lots of water. If you bring out crayons, give him a blank paper (without pre-made sketches) or perhaps, let him pick what to colour! Remember: form restricts imagination.
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Talk less, instruct less: Give the child a chance to create from her own inner impulse rather than just copy you and follow instructions. Avoid giving ideas; instead, give mediums using which the child can create.
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Nature: If possible, bring home natural artefacts and apply them open-endedly. Use sticks, seeds, flowers, shells, sand, mud, kitchen spices as mediums. Avoid plastic and definitely avoid the mobile phone.
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Stimulate senses, not thoughts: Sensorial stimulation is known to boost brain development in early years. Mediums like mud, clay, water, sand can spur a child’s imagination, build focus and also keep the senses stimulated. Yarn, thread and cloth stimulate touch better than plastic. Beeswax is a great medium which can keep even a 3-yr old busy for tens of minutes.
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Learn to switch off: You don’t have to engage your child in activities all day. Every child seeks me-time. Learn to sense this for your child and back off when needed.
4. Music. Songs have immense power to stimulate a child’s auditory senses and help in speech development. Songs, mingled with dance, can trigger the physical senses and give your child the much-needed joy of using the whole body as she speaks. A few guiding principles to keep in mind when using music with small kids:
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Keep it simple: You don’t have to bring out the i-pad and play complex tunes. Singing live, without background music, is always more effective with small children, especially if you’re working on their speech and language.
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Start with fingers: Your child’s fingers need to develop, physically, and sensorially, before they are made to write or type. Mix your singing and dancing on the fingers first, using what are called finger rhymes.
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Supplement with drumming: Dancing brings satisfaction and stimulation that singing alone cannot. Drumming (any form of rhythmic beating using hands/feet) takes the joy of singing to another level: it gets the child to create music with her body. You don’t need a real drum to introduce drumming to your child: your own body and a small table is enough to get you started.
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Songs build rhythms: You can sing together in a dedicated activity time or fit songs into your child’s daily schedule. Dedicated songs for toy-clearing, meals, walks, baths and sleep, helps the child build a sense of schedule much before she starts to understand time.
5. Love (a little extra). Children in these times are being deprived of touch from other human beings, and they are sensing fear all around them. As parents, we ought to shield our little ones from fear, spend more time with them, and show them our affection by hugging and cuddling them more regularly than before. While the perils of screen time for young ones are well-proven, many child development researchers argue that guided, well-timed video chats with loved ones can be beneficial for little children. In these difficult times, video chats can help children retain connection with close ones and reassure them of their presence and well-being.
We will share some literature on movements, finger rhymes, songs and drumming in the coming weeks.
December 5, 2019: Our nature-focused playgroup started on 14 October 2019 and we continue to meet three days a week in Cubbon Park. Since the beginning, we have had more than 10 children and their parents join our playgroup sessions and many continue to come back.
Each day we walk together in the park for at least 20 minutes, share a fruit snack, sing nature songs in a circle, and act out short stories, with movements and singing. On Mondays, we normally do a nature-craft activity, involving yarn, glue and natural artifacts. On Wednesdays, we do a combination of fruit-cutting, composting and clay play. On Fridays/Saturdays, we tend to focus on movements and rope-work.
Even in this short span, we have seen early evidence of the benefits of nature play and of Waldorf-styled activities amongst children. The toddlers in our program already show immense confidence in being able to climb trees and rocks on their own, and are so much at ease when jumping or hanging from heights, even when they play elsewhere. The songs and movements we teach have found their way into children’s free play at home. And most importantly, the children seem to be developing a sense of reverence for nature which, we feel, is lacking in the urban child’s perspective these days.
We do not use any toys in our playgroup; we tried in the beginning, but realised (the hard way!) that it is counter-productive to bring toys to a space like Cubbon park, so abundant in natural beauty. Children in our playgroup create their own toys from twigs, leaves, flowers, pods and, most importantly, mud. The only things we provide are coconut shells, which, at times, become baskets for our flower collection activities, and, at others, shovels for making a compost pit.
Below are some of the pictures that were taken during the past 7 weeks of our playgroup. We will share more in the coming weeks.
