Trip time...

Won't someone take me home and love me...

We had a wonderful trip today to the SPCA. If you have a child at a preschool or kindergarten in Auckland, then suggest their teacher's that they look at doing this trip. It is excellent. Take the tissues...They have two qualified and experienced teacher's who run it. It starts with a chat, accompanied by dvd clips as appropriate (trouble is the last one had lots of images in accompanied by music that brought a tear or ten to the adults eyes - not sickening images but really heartwarming ones). After this you visit the barn where the kids get to pat the kune kune pig, the sheep, chat to the bird, pat the rat and the rabbit. Then it's off to see the animals up for adoption. It doesn't cost anything but they ask for each child to bring a food item for the animals, eg a bag of dog biscuits or a tin of cat food type of thing. It was great timing too, as one of our kids, Gina, had just been on Animal House with her Mum, as they had adopted a pig, lots of the kids had watched this, so Gina was feeling pretty famous!

The Midline...

A really important feature of children's development is when the are able to cross the midline. This is an imaginary line down the middle of their body. There is another one across their waist. In the simplest form it means that your child subconciously understands that one half on their body can do something while the other stays still. If you can skip (as in skip around the room) then you have crossed the vertical midline, this should happen somewhere in your child's fourth year, in order for them not to have to many difficulties reading and writing. It takes longer to cross the horizontal midline - this is why when you do swimmng lessons with your four year old, the arms go but not the legs or vice versa!

To help children to cross the midline they need lots of cross patterning exercises, this is why the crawling stage is so important - it begins to get the neural pathways in the brain integrated. But just cos they are walking doesn't mean you can't have crawling races down the hallway! Playing opposite games will help too - left hand to right knee, right hand to left ear etc etc. Your eyes are an important part of this too - children who haven't crossed the midline, can't track right across a page, hence they can read, but have difficulties in doing so. They can read, but tend to stop on the page to early and then start again, or the writing gets unusually messy as they go along. Eyes are muscles that need help to develop as well - swinging a tennis ball in an old pair of pantyhose so children watch it swing from left to right and back again helps their muscles develop. So does pointing out things when your in the car - "look over there, there's Mc Donalds, oh what's that on the other side of the road..." If you notice your child rubbing their eyes often, when they are learning to read or write, it's because their eyes are getting tired and sore. (I'm assuming here they are showing no other signs of sight problems - and sight is different to vision, but that's another subject LOL!).

Janine wrote in her comments how her hubby swings her toddler around upside down - this is awesome, just close your eyes Janine, 'cos Mum's find this hard to watch LOL! If you have an unsettled newborn or little baby try hanging them upside down, supported of course, ideally along your arm or leg and on their tummy - they will settle almost instantly - think about how they are in utero...upside down...

Have a good weekend...I'm off to do some housework and then scrapbooking!