CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Children under the age of three use their senses - seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing - to find out about the world around them. So, banging, touching and 'tasting' spoons gives children from three months old an early lesson in textures and materials as well as helping to develop their visual awareness. Metal, they'll discover, is cold and hard, wood is warmer and lighter, while rubber can feel softer and be brightly coloured.
By the toddler stage, your child will be able to use spoons in many more playful ways and with that will come extra fun and learning, as our suggestions below will show. Playing with spoons also benefits children's physical development.
RESOURCES
Gather together a collection of spoons. The more varied the collection, the more play and learning should flow from it. Try to provide spoons of different:
- sizes
- materials
- colours
- designs
- purposes (spaghetti servers, Chinese soup ladles, measuring spoons, slotted spoons, etc), and decorative spoons. Check that all are safe for your baby or toddler to use.
PLAYING TOGETHER
One by one
- Place the spoons on the floor and encourage your child to explore them. As your child plays, name the kind of spoon they pick ('That's a teaspoon!'), emphasise what they do with it (Oh, you've dropped it!) and describe it ('It's really little and shiny, isn't it?'). This will support your child's awareness of naming words, doing words and descriptive words.
- Sit beside your child, start placing all the wooden ones together and invite them to help you. Then create another set, perhaps metal. Place two identical spoons next to each other, then alternate the types of spoon (plastic, metal, plastic, metal). Sorting, pairing, matching and sequencing spoons all helps to develop mathematical thinking.
Reach out
Place a spoon beyond your baby's reach and leave the spoon even further away once your baby is at the crawling stage. You could also place some spoons around your child to encourage them to bend and turn. This will provide practice in stretching, grasping and crawling - all good for developing physical skills and hand-eye co-ordination.
Rhyme time
Share with your child the traditional rhyme:
'Heh, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to hear such fun,
And the dish run away with the spoon.'
To make the telling more fun, paint a face on a wooden spoon and use animals toys as props. Tap out the rhythm with a spoon as you share the rhyme - and other songs - with your child. Rhymes help children's language development, while being aware of rhythm will help your baby learn to listen, to talk and, when they're older, to learn about numbers.
There are even storybooks about the rhyme. One that a two-year-old might enjoy is The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon by Mini Grey.
In the soup
Place on the floor two pots, two spoons and a small basket of objects (for example, a soft brick, sock, pom-pom, small ball and flower). Try using a spoon to put an object in one of the pots and suggest your toddler tries too.Stir your pot, saying, 'I'm making sock soup!' and ask, 'What kind of soup are you making?' If your child has little language, look low into his pot and exclaim, 'Flower soup ... Oh, yum!' Keep adding items to the pot and encourage your child to do the same and to name the different objects. Engaging in 'conversation' in this way will help your baby or toddler's language development.
More ideas
- Provide sand, water, bubbles or other mixtures like cornflour mixed with water for your child to scoop and stir. Add some slotted spoons to provide fun with sieving. This all helps your child to understand about different textures and materials.
- Encourage your toddler to help set the table.
- Use small wooden spoons as paintbrushes.
- Look at metal spoons together. Can you see your reflections?
Ask your child's key person at nursery for some more play ideas.
