Family Playtime Archives | Creating Together Parkdale

Setting Intentions for 2020

January 7, 2020 by Melanie

With the solar new year just completed and the lunar new year fast approaching (January 25th this year), its a great time to set some intentions and goals for the new year.

Just like adults, children benefit from goal and intention-setting. Creating a clear idea of what you’d like to achieve or experience, making a plan to go after it, and experiencing that sense of accomplishment when you’ve reached your goal – what an important life skill.

Whether it’s learning something new or spending more time with that special someone, talking about their goals and intentions for the year has several benefits:

Create clarity. Getting clear about what we want in life is a life skill that is key to actually attaining what we want in life.

Improve ability to communicate as a family – When we ask and truly listen to each other, it helps us all experience what healthy, supportive communication looks like.

Learn to celebrate resilience. Creating milestones so loved ones can come together to celebrate challenges and successes along the way. When parents and caregivers share their challenges in achieving their goals and children witness you learn from those challenges, celebrate those lessons, and get back to trying again, they learn resilience as well.

Increase trust. Sharing our goals and values and having them truly heard, supported and celebrated helps bring loved ones closer. It takes practice, but when it’s done well the trust that can be created is beautiful.

Teach important lessons. Sharing and working towards individual or shared intentions helps us learn important qualities of collaboration, cooperation, and working towards a common vision.

Have fun! Making it a game helps to take the pressure off, and teaches that goal setting can be fun. Imagine a better year together (sky’s the limit!), try out a worksheet, build a family collage. Enjoy the process!

Ready to give it a try? Here are some examples of worksheets you can create at home, to help guide some conversations with members of your family, about your own goals and one another’s!

Helpful Tip – we are here for you as a hub and a resource. If your child has a goal that you would like some resources on or would like to talk about (eg., reading, behaviour, healthy eating, exercise), let us know! We can also help you with goals related to parenting, healthy eating, and literacy.

Nurturing Art in Childhood

November 27, 2019 by Melanie

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

Art is vital to the mental, emotional, and psychological development in children. Children benefit from discovering art by doing and exploring an array of art materials. They are naturally curious and love to experiment with colors, textures and art tools. Using, safe, non-toxic art materials, toddlers can get messy using their hands to feel and apply paint; scribbling with markers and crayons; painting with sponges, brushes and other tools; squeezing safe modeling materials; cutting all types of paper products with safety scissors; gluing materials to create something new; and playing with shapes. These types of activities help toddlers to develop fine motor skills and cognitive abilities while promoting creativity and building fine motor skills.

“Research indicates that a child who is exposed to the arts acquires a special ability to think creatively, be original, discover, innovate, and create intellectual property—key attributes for individual success and social prosperity in the twenty-first century.”
International Child Art Foundation

How Parents and Caregivers Can Encourage Artistic Play

*Stencil Art Table at Creating Together*

Set Aside Space

Having a specific area in the home that always has a variety of art materials available for children is a great way to interest and encourage children to experiment with art. Don’t put everything out at once, as it can be overwhelming and distracting for a young child. Supply paper plates, recycled paper, old magazines and such to encourage creative clipping and for making pictures and collages.

Practice Non-Judgement

Resist the urge to direct a child’s art creation or judge it. Creative expression and making choices builds independence in young children, as they naturally learn to do more and more by themselves each day. A child may experiment with colors and end up with something that looks muddy – yet this unintended outcome is a great opportunity for a child to learn by doing.

*Huge gratitude to our funders for this new art station we were able to bring in*
*for the children of Creating Together!*

Ask Questions

Parents can show interest by asking their child about the story behind the artwork. “How did you make it?” What is it all about?” “What do you really like about it?” Listen up! When a child asks a question, encourage the child to solve it by him/herself. “How do you think that might work?” “What can you try?” What would happen if….” Parents and caregivers can reinforce language by discussing colors, shapes, patterns and all aspects of the creative process.

Displaying Artwork

Displaying a child’s artwork is also a great way to encourage a child to create art because it shows how much a parent values the child’s very original creation!

November Highlights

November 5, 2019 by Melanie

The November Calendar is now out, and we have a lot of amazing things in store for the parents, caregivers, and children of Parkdale. Read below for some great highlights!

Fun With Nature

Join us on November 11th and November 22nd to enjoy the benefits of nature, at our local parks.

Researchers and natural environmentalists have been studying the effects of exposure to nature on children, and have found some interesting results: Engagement with nature has huge benefits for children physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.

For instance, Adams & Savahl (2017) discovered it has a significant influence on children’s emotional and social well-being, while Pensini, Horn, & Caltabiano, (2016) discovered that early exposure to nature improves one’s mental health as an adult. Would you like to help improve your child’s short-term memory and ability to focus? Another study shows that being in nature for extended periods of time promotes the development of attention skills, while protecting against inattention-hyperactivity symptoms such as (Ulset, Vitaro, et al, 2017). There are also a number of physical benefits, such as improved vision, and reduced risk of obesity.

Keeping Active

Twice a month, we create healthier communities by bringing in the Busy Body Exercise Cards twice per month.

Did you know Adequate levels (60 minutes/day) of physical activity helps children:

develop cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, and bone density
maintain a healthy body weight
reduce the risk of chronic disease and health problems
lessen the likelihood of tobacco, alcohol, and drug use
feel better every day, through improved mental health and well-being

Scarf Dancing is not only fun, but it’s incredibly good for children, and can be practiced at home as well. Here are some benefits:

Sparking imagination as we explore all kinds of ways to play with our scarves
Teaching directional tracking as we visually track our scarves’ movement
Improving eye-hand coordination as we play catch or peekaboo
Increasing vocabulary as we verbally describe what we are doing with our scarves
Sharpening listening skills as we move our scarves based on musical or verbal cues
Practicing inhibitory skills as we start and stop our movements with the scarves

Fun with Food

Join us at 9:30am on November 5th for some family baking, or the 28th at 9:30am to make oatmeal, raisin cookies. And don’t forget our monthly Toddler Food Preparation workshop with Marcella from FoodShare!

Supporting Literacy

Every Monday is Literacy Day at Creating Together. From 9:30am to 10:30am a staff member will read with a small group or one-on-one, and introduce songs and stories on CDs as well as a variety of stories.

Also, storytime takes place every day at 1pm. Parents and caregivers are encouraged to bring a special book from home that can be shared during this time.

Our Family Support Worker can share with you some strategies on how to read to small children. Every two months a professional literacy consultant provides educational workshops for families. In fact, this month we are very happy to have circle with the Parkdale Public Library Librarian on the 29th at 11am.

Did you know? Books with CDs and headphones are available for use with the children and a variety of children’s books can be borrowed for use at home through our Resource Lending Library.

Encouraging Inquiry

Children learn so much through science. So, each month we facilitate a fun learning science activity. This month’s science activities are the “underwater volcano” on November 8th and “the orange experiment” on November 25th. Curious? Come out and enjoy!

Family Baking: Healthy Muffins

October 14, 2019 by Melanie

This week, parents and caregivers came together at Creating Together to enjoy family-time baking together making “Healthy Muffins”. We shared a great basic muffin mix, that you can change up by adding whatever dried fruit your little ones prefer! Scroll down for the recipe, and mark your calendars for our upcoming Toddler Food Preparation Workshop on October 16th at 10am!

Did you know…

You can freeze any muffin! Bake, completely cool and freeze in any air tight container for up to 3 months. Thaw on a counter for 3-4 hours or overnight.
Have an egg allergy? Want to try a vegan option? Substitute eggs with mashed banana, pumpkin, or applesauce (one-fourth cup of the purée per egg). Another option is ground flax or chia seeds (whisk together 1 tablespoon of ground chia or flaxseeds with 3 tablespoons of water until fully absorbed and thickened).

Try it at Home

If you couldn’t make it to family-time baking this week, enjoy the muffin recipe below and try it at home! Feel free to save and print this recipe card and add it to your cookbook 🙂

Scarf Dancing

September 30, 2019 by Melanie

The music turns on, the scarves are passed around, and the parents, caregivers, and kids go wild. Toss it. Twirl it. Throw it and catch it. And we kick off every month with it at Creating Together.

Benefits of Scarf Dancing

So what is scarf dancing and what makes it so great?

Most kids love dancing and involving a scarf makes it even more fun. Whether your child is a baby or toddler, there are so many great benefits to scarf play. KinderMusik, an organization committed to empowering young children to learn through music, describes a number of benefits to dancing with scarves (KinderMusik.com):

Sparking imagination as we explore all kinds of ways to play with our scarves
Teaching directional tracking as we visually track our scarves’ movement
Improving eye-hand coordination as we play catch or peekaboo
Increasing vocabulary as we verbally describe what we are doing with our scarves
Sharpening listening skills as we move our scarves based on musical or verbal cues
Practicing inhibitory skills as we start and stop our movements with the scarves

It may not sound like much, but kids love it – and there are so many different games that can be brought into the mix, to keep in changing each month.

Scarf Games and Activities to Try at Home

12 Educational Games to do with scarves at home, from Birth to Age 4 – ParentHub.com

Scarf Play at Home – KinderMusik.com

Scarf Activities for Kids – TheInspiredTreehouse.com