Sometimes it's nice to let babies explore on their own pile of leaves, parts, or water, or food, etc. and other times it's nice to set your baby up with a purpose for playing and exploring! These "activities" are a bit more "structured" and may require a quick demonstration for baby to mimic and learn how to complete a task or engage in an activity. Often times these explorations are focused around building pretend play, fine motor skills, gross motor skills or sensory play.
Exploring with a purpose can look like:
Using flour paint or sidewalk chalk to color or paint a sidewalk.
Putting pouch lids into a homemade slot container.
Exploring sensory jars and talking about what we see.
Putting multi-colored bingo chips in a homemade slot container.
Pretend playing with a dollhouse and just a few dollhouse items.
Trying on or playing with different props to pretend play animals, bugs, or baby dolls.
Sticker play - sticking dot stickers on circles drawn by parent.
Finding items hidden within a mixture of loose parts.
Listening to animal sounds and talking about what we hear.
Of course... as always, there are ๏ผณ๏ผฏ many more ideas to try! This shouldn't be an instructional session for baby, but more so a child-led invitation to learn and explore with a casual purpose in mind. If your baby wants to eat the stickers instead of sticking them on paper, or dump out the pouch lids over and over-- this is okay! This is still exploring and it's still purposeful. Don't sweat it! โค๏ธ
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