Play is the only work your young one resonates with - just watch how far your baby is concentrating as you see her absorbed in trying to place one brick on top of another. Through play, your baby learns about the world and her discoveries fuel her development.
Child play may appear simply to be a way of passing time but it is one of the ways babies discover how and why the world behaves as it does.
Experimenting with toys and other objects helps your baby acquire social and physical skills. By playing, she embarks on the road to becoming a competent thinker. Children play because they love playing. If it’s not fun, it’s not play.
Try to avoid over-organizing playtime. Your role is essentially to offer opportunities for play. Play is your child’s key to discovering how the world around her works.
Newborn to three months
Your new baby experiences the world through the senses of sight, sound and touch and relies on you to show her a range of objects to stimulate her.
She’ll enjoy looking at face-shapes, black and white patterns, brightly-colored objects and moving or noisy objects - all stimulating her visual awareness and general perception and helping development of the part of the brain that controls thinking.
She will also like mobiles, a plastic mirror and pictures of faces for her cot - though your moving, responding face is her favorite.
By three months, your baby will probably swipe at dangling objects which encourage her hand-eye coordination and marks the start of her hand skills.
She will be trying to grasp objects, and you can encourage this with rattles of varying shapes and sizes - the noise holds her attention and helps her concentration develop. She may also enjoy the sight and texture of small, simple soft toys.
Three to six months
At three to six months, you are still your baby’s favorite toy and she will probably start grabbing at your face and hair at around four months. She’s beginning to explore and will automatically put everything to her mouth where the sensitive nerve endings can explore the size, shape and texture of objects. She’ll enjoy toys she can suck and chew in different textures, such as teething rings, rubber toys.
By six months, your baby uses her hands more to touch and explore different texture and shapes and likes trying to manipulate objects. An activity centre or baby gym will feed her budding concentration and hand-eye coordination, and encourage large body movements such as half-rolling or rolling.
Six to 12 months
Once she can sit up, at around six months, your baby will be able to explore more expertly with her hands. She may enjoy sitting through a basket of different objects. Everything she grabs is explored, first by mouth and later with her fingers.
By 12 months, fine finger skills and hand-eye coordination improve and your baby should have a good pincer grip. She’ll probably enjoy sorting and stacking toys, and a box of objects to empty and fill.
Bath toys also come into their own once your baby sits up well. Buckets, beakers, ducks or boats - which will help her understanding of volume an of floating and sinking. Wheeled toys will also help her understanding cause and effect as she finds she can make them more.
Books free her understanding. Look for those with clear, colorful pictures, simple words, and different textures -board, cloth or vinyl - so your baby can mouth and chew as well as look and listen.
12 to 18 months
Increasingly, your child uses her eyes and senses of touch to explore. Favorite playthings during this period may include water, sand, mud, flour and jelly - messy but educational - as she learns how different substances behave.
With a longer concentration span and growing understanding of language, she’ll appreciate books with longer stories and nursery rhymes. Read her favorites over and over, she’ll love it and the repetition helps her memory develop.
