Posted on 01/23/2016 12:20:20 PM PST by dangus
Future parent? Recent Parent? As a fairly old first-time parent, I thought I'd share some things I hadn't known about for entertaining young kids. (I'd be thrilled if this thread was eternal because new parents share their discoveries.)
My son is 3. He still seems a long way away from when he cares whether a toy was a brand name or a home made. Fantastic. Home-made entertainment isn't nearly so hard. But this isn't ONLY about home-made entertainment.
Modeling clay is much better than Play-dough. Play-dough actually sucks. With a young kid, you can't control when it's going to dry out, (You can refresh mildly stale Play-dough by wrapping it in wet paper towels.) You also can't control when colors will blend together; they will wherever you put different colors next to each other. And nothing has any support: you simply cannot make something on legs with Play-dough. Modeling clay bends when you bend it, but holds it shape when you don't, instead of wilting. It's non-toxic, never dries out and never needs to be dried out to stiffen it, so it's infinitely reusable, and fairly cheap. And because it doesn't blend, you can use it to create remarkably fine details .
By the way, the modeling clay is for YOU. It's fun and not terribly difficult to make whatever characters your kid is into.
Colored cardboard is much better than construction paper. You can make toy buildings, etc., that -- again -- have strong enough structure to become toys, not just art projects. But glue is fairly poor for making toys. I find two-sided tape works much better.
Did you know that you can turn any piece of panelling or plywood into a dry erase board with a special, inexpensive can of spray paint? You might not want to rely on it for business presentations, unless you're better at keeping the bubbles out than I was on my first try, but the bubbles didn't make it non-function. And now my son can draw all over anything he wants to. This morning we were drawing a village on a large piece of panelling, that he could drive his Matchbox cars all over.
Buying toys is tough nowadays. There are so many cool toys to help grow your kids imagination, and also thinking skills... and they're often waaaay cheaper than they were when we were kids. But now when you buy a toy, you invest in a "universe" of interrelated toys. And even a given brand or character doesn't mean that they toys are from the same universe:
I bought the new "trackmaster" Thomas trains (with grey tracks). I wasn't too surprised that the older (beige-track) trains couldn't climb the new hills as well, but I was surprised that the newer ones had trouble gripping the old tracks.
But they CAN be interoperable in surprising ways: I stayed away from the wood tracks because they were so expensive. But I found cheap wood tracks from other makers flooded e-bay, and they fit fine with Thomas tracks and Thomas trains.
Legos -- even old ones on E-bay -- are cost more than their weight in gold. If you find them in a thrift store, nab them. Buy the smaller pieces with single rows of nubs... you can use single-rowed Duplos (large Legos for kids under 4) instead of double-rowed Legos. But don't buy Megablox: they don't interconnect with Lego; they don't really connect well with each other; and most of the pieces are useless single-nub pieces. K'Nex work well with Legos, but they aren't much cheaper.
Don't ever throw toys away, or sell them at yard sales. EVERY toy is a collector's item in the age of E-bay.
Your kid will never need a TV to see his favorite shows. Everything is on YouTube. My son is fixated on Thomas the Tank Engine (here in the states, the mini-episodes were compiled into a longer show called Shiny Time Station). I also like Curious George for him, because that little monkey is really an engineer in training. HIGHLY educational. Sesame Street isn't so educational anymore, but it's still not bad. And I totally expected kids these days to be great at computers at a very early age -- after all in my generations, parents marvelled at tweener kids like me programming -- I was blown away that it's absolutely normally for 3-year-olds to be masters of smart phones!
In the 1970s, after all of the family Christmas packages were opened, etc., I noticed my 3-year-old niece was missing. I walked into the kitchen and found her. She was sitting in a corner of the room playing — not with the $$$ of toys she and the other kids got — but playing with the empty boxes stuff came in.
I thought — she is enjoying the boxes because she is only limited by her own imagination to create whatever she desired.
When I was a kid, Play-Doh was something that you extruded through a plastic device. Modeling clay was what you used when you wanted to create something.
But the Play-Doh smelled good!
Does it smell as good as Play-Doh? I loved the smell of it.
My niece was actually reading at 2-1/2. We thought maybe she had memorized the story, but no, she could actually read. That was about 30 years ago.
:-)
... now, unlike Play-Doh, that Elmer’s School Paste glue, it tasted as good as it smelled, lol.
OK, you got me there. It’s pretty scentless. And it doesn’t make your fingers salty.
We have budgies and the kids have a ton of fun designing and making little play houses with me for them. We use cardboard and construction paper. They love watching them play in them and then tear them up.
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