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Me and My toddler, Active Playtime

The Play Project Active Play Program is designed to develop children’s gross motor skills, coordination, balance and social skills. The classes require parental involvement and encourage playtime between parent and child. The activities will promote coordination, social interaction, language development, cognitive development and awaken a child’s imagination.

Children will enjoy guided play, music, dance and free play during the sessions. The obstacle courses change every week for children to explore. Sports equipment, musical instruments and creative props are used throughout the sessions.

The group will run weekly through the school term.

Time: 9:30am – 11:00am

Term 1: Every Tuesday

1.5hr session

Morning tea provided

Call 0439 485 500 to book or enquire about costs and for more details

Having a calm, organized and productive morning will set you up to have a calm, organized and productive day. By implementing a routine and using my tips it will help you and your kids to have a good start to the day.

First of all, make some time for yourself!
Wake up and meditate for 10-20 minutes, you can do this from bed, because I know how hard it can be to get out of bed early in the morning. You can use a guided meditation, like the smiling mind app, or if you’re not really a meditation person you can just spend some time to focus on your breathing and imagine your dream life or future goals. Make sure you don’t use your phone or spend any of this time worrying about things you need to do today. This needs to be some time for yourself. Spend the last few minutes, of the meditation setting your intentions for the day and thinking about what you want to achieve.

I know this precious sleep time, but giving yourself these minutes will be more relaxing and resting and help to give you patience and positive energy throughout the day. To start with, it may be easier to do 3-5 minutes, rather than 10-20.

Do some exercise for 15 minutes or stretch.
Take some time for yourself before the kids are up to get outside, get some fresh air and do some exercise. When we fill up our own cup, it’s so much easier to deal with the kids. Whereas, when the kids wake us up, we wake up grumpy and everything seems like hard work.

If your kids are too young for you to be out of bed before them, start with some snuggle time. The deep pressure they get from snuggling with you, makes their body feel good and will set their body up for the day. If they don’t like snuggles then read a story. Just spend some quality time so your child, so they feel loved and connected rather than rushing through the mornings and feeling stressed for the day ahead. Even though implementing this in your morning routine will mean you start your day later, it will run much smoother and be much more enjoyable for everyone.

Cut technology and put on some music
Music has a very powerful effect on our body and our mood. The beat of the music determines how your body is feeling. Slower beat music slows us down, fast music brings us up.  I like to start our mornings with around 100bpm, we usually listen to Ed Sheeran in our house because it’s a beautiful music to get us all going. You can see the kids bopping along to the music as they eat their breakfast. It puts you and them in a good mood and it syncs our body’s and natural heart rate to the beat.

Try not to use the TV in the morning because you’ll find it really hard to get the kids away from it. If you have to use the TV in the morning – use it after they’re ready for school. But even then, I strongly discourage the use because the TV will overstimulate their brains and they’ll find it difficult to be able to reset to start learning. Teachers have said they can tell the difference if the kids have been watching the TV and are overstimulated when they arrive.

Arrive to school early
As much as the teachers might not me saying this, try to walk, ride or get your kids to school by 8.30am. This will allow the kids to have some time to run around, play on the monkey bars and get their bodies ready for learning. One thing that’s tricky for teachers is when they have some students arriving at school and their engine is running really high and others who are still half asleep, and the teachers are trying to teach in the middle. If the kids are at school early, they are able to run around and the ones that are bouncing off the walls can huff and puff to bring them down and the half asleep students can run around and wake up. This helps everyone to meet in the middle and get ready for learning, especially if the kids are supposed to go straight into quiet reading in the morning. Certainly, things that are working their muscles are better. So if they walk or ride to school, let them carry their own backpacks because the extra weight in their backpack provides deep pressure into their muscles and joint and gets them ready for the day.

Food has to be fun
If you have a child who you struggle to feed breakfast in the morning, maybe back off on the pressure of that for a while because food has to be fun! If we take the pressure of it, they can relax and then they can enjoy it and we can then start to make some healthier habits.
If they are having breakfast try focus on high protein, lots of good fats and foods that will stick with them throughout the day and not give them big sugar spikes and then crash as they get to school. So avoid highly processed and sugary cereals.

I know in my house since we’ve created a happier morning and evening routine, it’s made us all a lot calmer and it’s easier to get out of bed and be a part of a peaceful routine in the morning.

Do you get frustrated that your child wont go to bed, or worse…… you finally get them to sleep, then they wake up and don’t want to go back to their own bed? 

We’ll this rewards chart may be just what you need. Giving children choices, a sense of control and positive reinforcement is the key to creating healthy, happy kids.

These bed time and toileting charts are a positive way to encourage MORE of the behaviour your want to see and LESS of the behaviour you don’t.

You can use stickers or colour the stars in to help your child visually track their reward.

I suggest you only use one chart at a time and that you place it in an easy to see location that is just out of reach, like the back of the bedroom/toilet door, or on the fridge.

You can choose to either colour in the stars or use stickers to show how your child is progressing towards their rewards.

Involve them as much as you can in choosing the location, ask them if they want to use colours or stickers, and give them a choice between 2 rewards that you feel are appropriate. The more ownership they take the more success you will have.

NOTE: Be sure to make the rewards motivating for your child and when introducing the rewards chart give them multiple stars per day and a reward in the first day or two so that they get the idea of it. Once they understand its value you can increase the expectations.

Check out The Play Project on Facebook or Instagram or visit our website http://www.theplayprojects.com/ for more great tips on growing happy, healthy and confident kids.

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We all face challenges every single day. As an occupational therapist, I’ve seen how individuals and families struggle to overcome them.

Different people have different challenges
For some, their challenge could be physical, like moving around the house, getting dressed and other self-care tasks, especially after an illness, injury or disability.

Others have difficulty in social interactions, dealing with emotions, stress and cognitive or psychological changes.

But no matter how small or big we think these challenges are, whether it’s physical, emotional, social or psychological, it doesn’t change the fact that they are the barriers that stop people from living a happy, healthy and fulfilled life.

Challenges exist both for the young and old
Working with parents, teachers and children the past 10 years and helping them overcome their challenges made me realize that there is an increasing number of children with attention and concentration issues, learning behavior and mental health-related difficulties.

Engagement in meaningful daily activities helps not just the children but also the parents, teachers and caregivers in understanding the source of the problem. This in turn makes putting a solution in place easier.

It takes a village to raise a child
This has never been truer.

I want to help all kids enhance their self-esteem, have a sense of accomplishment and develop the skills they need to become whole and happy individuals.

But there are many factors that contribute to their overall health and wellness. That’s why it is important for parents, caregivers and teachers have access to all the information they can get that will help them do this.

We often hear people say that tackling the issue of fussy eating is too hard. However, Kait was fortunate enough to work with this amazing family a couple of months ago who showed us just what is possible and how it doesn’t have to take as long as you first think.  We asked them to share their journey so far to show others what is possible!

Background

My son Z is 4 ½ and hadn’t eaten fruit or vegetables since he was around 1 year old and had stopped being spoon-fed. He had total reluctance to try new foods, afraid of anything with flavour.  He would gag if I ever managed to bribe fruit or veggies past his lips. His diet consisted of toast with vegemite or Nutella, sweet chocolate ‘ breakfast biscuits’, dry chocolate cereal, white rice crackers and tasty or processed cheese, custard, sausages, fish fingers, white potato, gnocchi with tomato sauce, processed snitzel and nuggets, hot chips, anything flavoured like ‘chicken’ or ‘cheese’ kids snacks, chocolate milk.

There was a lot of shame and guilt around what Z ate, especially seeing’s I have a predominately Paleo diet myself so I know what are good food choices and bad food choices but I felt I had no choice. He would not eat or try a thing apart from these foods unless it looked like chocolate.

Preparation.

As soon as I left my appointment with Kait I began to limit and reduce the amount of processed food Z consumed. I saw this approach as my only option and 100% committed so I was no longer hung up on what I had spent on groceries or how much processed food we had left. This had to work. Over the course of a couple of days Z had his last of many things. A bowl of custard was 1 for him and the rest down the sink. He was given the last few items in their packets so he could see it was gone.

I transitioned him onto whole clean foods and he ate only these for 2 weeks before attempting the modbiotic (outright, by amp science). I used substitutes that I could disguise as his previous diet and in the end with no alternatives in the cupboard he soon realised that there was no other option (he had previously always had an option, there was always something in the cupboard so he never had to eat the healthier alternative as I was worried about him starving himself). I also used this period to figure out how I was going to hide the GUTRIGHT powder that had been recommended to rebalance his little body.

The range of foods Z currently eats is still limited but as I am content that it is 100% goodness going into his body, I’m not concerned about the limited variety as like Kait had said, once we start to heal the bugs in his gut we will notice the range of foods he will eat will increase quickly and that is exactly what is happening.  It is expanding week by week. I trust the process and the results I have seen in under a month with both behaviour and willingness to try new foods gives me nothing but hope for a healthy balanced future.

All items were sourced at our local health foods store, Woolworths or IGA. Most important rule of thumb is READ LABELS. If you don’t know what an ingredient is or what it derives from it is most likely NO GOOD.

GUTRIGHT

Z was not responsive to milkshakes or Smoothies unless they were jam packed with Cottees topping and ice cream so these were out of the question (initially, he now likes them) to hide the daily dose. I baked it in muffins, made raw balls, mixed with honey…. All of which were unsuccessful. I actually purchased 2 containers of the modebiotic as I knew I would need to test recipes so the 10 days/ 30 serves was successful and I didn’t run out or become panicked if he didn’t eat it.

My Ice creams were a hit! Coconut milk, banana, cacao. The organic cacao that I use has a spiced chocolate profile so the GUTRIGHT could be concealed. After the 2 week transition and my reassurance they were the same as the other ; ) he ate them- 3 times a day for 10 days. 1 after breakfast, 1 after lunch, 1 after dinner. With weather warming up I had no complaints in offering ice cream 3 times a day. I even took them to his day care and provided them with his morning and afternoon tea during this 10 days. Dietary requirements are catered for with all children so this was respected and adhered to by staff.

*I ensured that dinner for the 10 days was something I knew he would eat and didn’t try to introduce new things in this period. Our usual routine after dinner would be a coconut milk ice cream if dinner was finished, I didn’t want to give mixed signals of giving him his GUTRIGHT ice cream without finishing his meal considering he thought these ice creams were treats. I felt he still needed to finish his dinner to receive one so we had consistent rules after the 10 day kickstart.

Where are we now?

Every day Z’s palate is changing. Tonight he had lamb cutlets (no crumb) and homemade SWEET POTATO fries in coconut oil for dinner! By re balancing his gut he is no longer ‘afraid’ of food and is more willing to try different things. He is yet to sit down to a bowl of fruit salad but his perception of flavour is changing and the fear subsiding. It is a process and each day is different. The change in diet has caused him to be less emotional and irrational, without crazed demands for ‘junk’ food.  He now eats more at meal times and no longer ask me all day for snacks or tantrum when they aren’t what he wants.

The key is to be prepared. I had muffins, cheese, rice cakes and treat bars at the ready. Pancakes ready to reheat and the evening meal planned in advance. If I was prepared it was easier to stick to my plan and I had food available that I knew Z would eat.  I provide and he decides. With no alternatives he will always choose what I have provided if he is hungry and I am not concerned because I know he has eaten it before. If a temper tantrum strikes I try to diffuse with humour or a fun activity to distract and he will usually go back to the snack…. Especially when I attempt to eat it myself!

Our grocery list and menu options

My food choices were based on the ATP Science specific carbohydrate diet list

• Wholemeal Spelt Sourdough Toast/ sandwich with Vegemite
• Brown Rice cakes with Colby Cheese.

• Homemade almond meal muffins

(This recipe was altered substituting banana and dates with orange and poppy seed or banana and cacao or some other alternative that is well received. Keep Almond meal/ baking soda/ egg/ water/ oil measurements the same and play around with sweeteners, apple puree, coconut sugar, dates soaked and blitzed with banana. I found mixed spice was a good additive because Z thought they were gingerbread cakes)

• Kez’s Kitchen ‘Treat ‘ Bars OR shop bought raw balls ( READ INGREDIENTS)

In recent weeks I have had the pleasure of spending time in quite a few primary school classrooms across our region and I have loved seeing teachers adopting flexible learning principles and experiencing the benefits of open plan teaching.

What I have also noticed is the high number of children with incorrect pencil grasp or of more significant concern not forming letters correctly. In our jam packed curriculum the importance of developing these foundations for writing correctly is often overlooked. However, the implications for future learning can be signifcant.

Correct letter formation and writing forms the foundation for creating neural pathways that are essential for reading, memory, visual skills and higher neural efficiency.

Once a child is in grade 1 or above correcting pencil grasp or incorrect letter formation becomes very difficult as the habit is already deeply engrained. Hence, learning these skills correctly the first will ensure you create a solid foundation for future academic development.

Check out our simple video based helping with handwriting program or our downloadable letter formation booklet for a fun approach to developing these important academic skills.

To discuss any concerns you have with your child’s handwriting, or to find out more about our school holiday handwriting intensives. fill out the form below to arrange a FREE 15 minute phone chat with Kait.