Explore PLAY in your daily routine care
So what kind of PLAY are we talking about? We are talking about this serve and return interactions, bringing PLAY into our daily routine care with our babies! 👶
Meal times
During breast feeding or milk bottle feeding, keeping eye contact, smiling, gently chatting with your baby; humming a tune or singing a song. This helps your baby to develop a secure attachment in your loving embrace.
When a child babbles “Mum mum” . Mummy or daddy can say “yes mummy/daddy is feeding you milk/ porridge” or “Yes this is Mummy” For older babies, you can even provide an extra spoon to encourage your baby to explore holding and using the spoon to imitate what you are doing.
Refrain from baby talk. Chat with your baby using simple words, so this is how they develop emergent language skills.
Diapering
Very often, a baby gets anxious--crying or fussing because he/she does not know what to expect. Therefore, chatting with your baby to let him/her know beforehand, each step you are taking during the routine care helps to calm your baby.
During diapering we can say “Oh mummy needs to clean you up, lets change your diaper.” While diapering, it is wonderful to inject some playfulness by chanting a rhyme, singing a song or just simply play with your child by gently tickling, and tapping their little fingers or toes.
Bathtime
Bathtime is a wonderful time to include language in this sensory routine care, using their 5 senses to help babies understand language through play. For example in the bath:
Touch: We can say ”The warm water feels good!”
Sight: We can say ”Look at the bubbles!”
Sound: “We can say “Listen to splashing sound of water!”
After bath we usually feed our babies, so we can say:
Smell: “You smell so good after your bath!
Taste: “You like the taste of your cereal, don’t you?”
Sylvia, a PLAY advocate for young children.
To view our PLAY from Birth Video Series, please go to our Lagom Kids’ YouTube channel:
PLAY from Birth - Part 2: Why PLAY is so important + Mealtime