The Playful Baby

As a former teacher and now stay-at-home mom, this is my favorite book when I need ideas of things to do with our baby. This book is set up as informal lessons that you can do with things you have around the house. Most of the activities use all five senses and incorporate singing, moving, touching, and sometimes eating. I especially love that she extends the activities a step further if the original idea is too simple for your child. The 12-18 month old activities are broken up into fine motor development, gross motor development, language development, cognitive development, and social/emotional development. I didn't realize the importance of this until I was picking activities for my daughter. My daughter has good motor skills, but doesn't "talk" that much, so I choose the language development activities more often. She loves all of them! I loved this book so much that I have ordered the other two in the series. We'll have plenty of creative things to do until she goes to kindergarten!

Recently, I resigned from my teaching position to focus on raising my baby full-time. Each activity is a normal every day activity most everyone does with or encounters with their babies: using a rattle, nursing, walking, crawling, etc. No special equipment required.Becky Daniel has set this "manual" up in easy to use "lesson plans" with the objective, set-up, process, assessment (how did you and your baby do?) and an "encore" to advance the technique, if you like. This is such an easy book that explains why and how certain types of play are essential to baby's development. Why not know why play works, rather than poo-pooing it as though we're just "playing" ??? Enjoy this book thoroughly, I am!