Activity books for babies - my review

Roadtest: Activity Books for Babies I am constantly reading early childhood development books for ideas to use in my classes and thought that you may all be interested in my thoughts on three of the best that I have come across. Games Babies Play: from birth to twelve months - Vicky Lanky (Book Peddlers) http://www.bookpeddlers.com/ http://www.practicalparenting.com/ This book divides the games into a chronological order that has inspired the structure of the BabyLoveMusicFun program. The four sections are:birth to 3 months; 3-6 months; 6-9 months and 9-12 months. I found the book perfect for the first 12 months with my baby and could easily flip to a section have a quick read and get straight into the activity. All the activities were easy to follow, quick to read and were really spot on in terms of the age advised to play the activity and how much they would enjoy it. All of the activities I tried in this book were winners. Ideas that I use in my program from this book include: baby stretching, parent a acapella, bus baby aerobics, airplane baby, tick tock, play ball, zoo basket, balloon games, megaphone magic, making rain and clothespin drop. 365 Games Smart Babies PLay - Sheila Ellison & Susan Ferdinandi (Sourcebooks Inc) http://www.sourcebooks.com/ (available at Borders bookstore) This one is for babies from birth to 15 months and is divided into categories/themes such as bedtime, water/bath time, music, dramatic play etc. Within each category it starts with infant appropriate activties and progresses up through about 15 months. There is 'wit and wisdom' from other parents who have tried the various activities...which helps make you feel that what you are doing is really worthwhile. There are some really unique and quite special activities in this book. For example - Baby's Poem for 12 months and up: which is basically creating a poem with your baby using the words that they are starting to say. You write a list of all their words and then you can go crazy and create songs, sentences and poems with their words. Here's one Roxy and I wrote just the other day: Moon Mama Moon Peek Boo Cuckoo Moo Moo Moo Brilliant Brain games for Kids to Enjoy (Hamlyn) (available at Borders bookstore)

This one is for toddlers through to five years so there is great value in this $22.00. I'm using the activities in this one daily at the moment. We are concentrating on the 'fun at home' chapter and this has been great.

The activities are really easy to do...for example go on a rainbow treasure hunt with your baby around house. We had alot of fun going around with the laundry basket collecting blue things the other day - and now guess what, she knows the colour blue!

This book is for the parent who wants to make sure that the quality time they spend with their baby is educational and FUN. There are also research tips all through the book which are not only interesting but help you understand the value of the activities.

Here's one to leave you with:

" by exposing your child to a wide variety of music, you stimulate regions of the brain responsible for spatial, verbal, balance ,memory and other skills'

WOW - all that from the simple gift of music!