So You’re Living the ‘Sheltered’ Life Now
We are all spending much more time at home these days, and Play Frontier wants to find new ways of empowering families to incorporate play and nature into this sudden lifestyle change! We've got some projects brewing to help everyone at home with this new stay-at-home-all-the-time life. While all of us at Play Frontier are missing our school families, we are excited to share some of our knowledge with you in a new digital way over the next few weeks.
We call this new space on the website ‘The Homestead’, and to kick things off we’d like to help you find a new normal.
We've seen a lot of daily schedules floating around lately, and they seem to focus on the adult in the relationship instead of the child. With that, we made a "home play rhythm" schedule. The idea is that you do the same predictable order of things each day, allowing your children to feel comfort in the routine. At the same time, the things they DO during each block will change each day based on their mood, interests, and energy levels. As a bonus for Play Frontier preschoolers - this is more or less the same schedule we use at school, so they should already know the pacing of this rhythm! The preschool has one drawn out in our room, and we find kids checking in on the "map of the day" to see what happens next.
How To Use our Home PlAY rhYthm Schedule
Print this out (or write it out yourself if you don't have access to a printer right now) and hang it somewhere your kids can see it. The schedule is purposefully a weird shape so you and your family can draw simple illustrations along the sides that represent things unique to your child and your house and your family. They don’t have to be fancy! Stick figures are great! Even better, encourage your child to draw meaningful things to THEM. Bonus: include them in the project, tell them what letters you’re writing, and suddenly this is an awesome literacy activity AND builds trust and respect.
DID YOU NOTICE that there aren't any times?! This is very important. So important I’d shout it from the rooftops if you all could hear me… young children are task-based, NOT time-based like adults. What does this mean? It means they don’t give a hoot that it’s 12:00 and lunchtime, they NEED to finish their drawing first. Completion of tasks is critical to them, and the sooner you embrace that time is an adult construct the easier your transitions will be!
Hey wait, this does NOT apply to food and sleep. Well it does, a little, but not in the same way. Eating and sleeping at about the same time every day will help eliminate a whole new mess of struggles. It will help kids actually feel hungry and know if they get TOO hungry food is coming soon. It will help them mentally prepare for rest and start noticing how their own body feels when it’s tired. Really, the goal here is healthy happy kids who are in charge of their own bodies!
Coming soon: Home Play Rhythm in action, Independent play ideas for inside and out, killer playdough recipes, tasty treats, and much much more! Anything in particular you’d like to see or know more about? Leave a comment below or contact us at tiffany@playfrontier.org.