Colouring Pages!

Now Bee is growing up I love to do crafty things with her and one of our easiest and most frequent is colouring. When Bee was tiny our first forays into wielding a crayon involved a pad I'd gone out and bought 'specially at Mothercare, I'd been so excited at getting Bee started. Sadly for me she really didn't seem interested, crayons were clearly for chewing on, not drawing.

As she grew it became easier to encourage her to scribble with the crayon rather than eat it, although her attention-span was very short. The paper just wasn't holding her interest and, thinking back, it's not surprising. To give her something to focus on I went out and bought some colouring books with large, simple pictures and it became useful for me to focus Bee's attention on individual parts of the picture: "let's colour the dolly's shoes" etc.

Bee has a very short attention span across the board, not just with colouring so I was pleased when the colouring books seemed to improve matters a little. Still, it wasn't enough. I could maybe get 2 or 3 minutes of really focused attention off Bee before she was emptying the crayon box and wandering away from the table, looking for something else to play with. It's important to me that Bee starts to master simple skills like holding a crayon correctly and control techniques. They are things that will become neccessary as she gets older and we don't want her attention problems to prevent her from achieving. 

One day last week inspiration struck. At home we have a digital photo frame that flashes up with a new picture every 5 seconds or so and Bee loves to sit and watch the pictures change, telling me who's on each picture. One morning, while sitting together and watchingt he frame it occured to me that the pictures Bee likes best are of people she knows. She could look at pictures of herself and the people close to her for ages and not get as easily distracted as with other things.

So I got myself on Photoshop and here is the result:

 

I made 5 different ones in total, all with Bee and various combinations of her loved ones. They were easy to photocopy from there to keep her with a constant supply. So far she loves them and we've had great fun colouring Mama's nose in blue and Daddy's nose in green, Grandma's ears in red and Bee's mouth in purple! So far these personal colouring sheets have held Bee's attention for the longest and so far I've got a good ten minutes of colouring out of her before she starts to lose focus, a record!

If anyone would like to know how these are made:

• Open your picture in Photoshop
• Choose 'filter' from the menus at the top
• From there go into 'sketch' and choose 'photocopy'
• This should open a new box where you can change a few levels about to get it looking how you want.
• Save as a JPG and print!

This doesn't work well with all pictures, some are too busy for them to colour out with large white spaces and can be very black so you might need to try a few different ones.

I've noticed since using these that Bee's accuracy seems to be getting better. To the untrained eye it may look like she's just randomly placing scribbles across the page but if you ask her to colour a specific part of the picture you'll find the scribbles are centered on that part. I'm really thrilled with that, it's one small step of progress along the road towards pen-control. These personalised colouring pages have really worked for us so far and I'm going to keep printing different ones so Bee has a constant stream of pictures to keep her interest.

Glorious Gloop!

 

This afternoon Bee and I have been further broadening her sensory horizons and playing in gloop! We haven't tried gloop before but I saw it on the shelf at Toys'r'Us and thought "why not?" It's designed to put in the bath but I thought that may be just a little too much sensory overload for Bee and bring on a meltdown so we started small, although still with a bath...

To start with I gave Bee some of her plastic drumsticks and we did mixing, slowly building her confidence by allowing her to interact with the gloop without touching it. She got braver as the activity progressed, handling things that had gloop on them. She enjoyed digging out gloop with her spade and filling a little bucket, then pouring it all back in and laughing as it went splat back in the baby bath!

After leaving Bee to lead the play for a while I took the tools away from her and tried hiding her little Makka Pakka and Iggle Piggle in the mixture, hoping she would be brave enough to put her hand in to retrieve them. She tried, touching the surafce with her finger but couldn't quite work up the courage to place her whole hand in. She asked me for the tools back, wanting to dig out the toys but I re-focused her back on the bath and showed her how to poke at them with her fingers. It took repeated encouragement but she eventually uncovered enough to feel confident picking them out, Makka Pakka first then Iggle Piggle.

As the session wore on Bee became more confident in touching the gloop although still had some small moments when it touched the palms of her hands, which brought on some frantic hand-washing motions until she felt it had gone. Afterwards I took her upstairs for a bath to wash off all the gloop and we had just as much fun doing splashing and washing her doll!

 

Overall we had lots and lots of fun and the gloop went much more sucessfully than I'd anticipated. We explored texture and smell (mmm cotton candy!) and, in Bee's case, taste too! I'm going to continue with the gloop in a bowl for a few more sessions and then *maybe* try a shallow bath. We'll see how it goes.

 

 

Garden Music

Recently I've been trying to encourage Bee to be more confident outside the house with different activities, hoping that they'll build her tolerance of different surfaces and textures. We've dug in the compost, planted flowers and seeds and played with the garden hose. Next on the agenda was an activity to incorporate Bee's love of music with encouraging her outside: a tin can musical instrument! 

I'd been saving tin cans with the aim of string them together to create a sort-of wind chime/xylophone instrument that Bee could hit using her drum sticks or just bash with her hands so they clinked together. 

Of course before stringing it up in the garden our first job was to paint them!

I let Bee loose with various bright paints and some paintbrushes and she really enjoyed making marks on the tins and 'mixing' the paint in the bowls. I had to encourage her to paint the sides, she only wanted to do the tops. I found she was more willing to paint the sides when I placed the tin on a bottle of paint.

The following day, once the tins had dried I used a nail and a hammer to punch a hole in the top of each one before spraying them with a clear acrylic to make them weather-proof. Once they were again dry I threaded twine through the holes, strung them all together and hung them across one of our fence panels.

Bee has had great fun making 'music' with her new tin can instrument and I'm hoping to make a few more garden musical items to add as summer wears on. If this rain ever goes away!