Last year was great, but it’s a pity that it has passed so quickly. Among other things, we attended two interesting courses with Olivia starting when she was about four months old.
One of them (here called PEKiP) was based on the idea of the Czech child psychologist Dr. Jaroslav Koch, who dealt with sensory and motor stimulation of children under one year. The main idea was that while we moms were talking about everything related to our babies watching them carefully, our children played naked. Although I didn’t think that it makes such a difference, Olivia could move much easier without diaper. There is a bunch of books about PEKiP activities, but I was interested the most in one picture book with 50 games for baby movement.
The completely different second course was based on the idea of doctor Emmi Pikler. With the motto give me time to do it myself, moms sat around the room and watched their children playing and dealing with different situations. I must say that it’s really easy to show your child directly how to do everything or even better not to wait and do it for him, but it is very difficult only to observe him and believe that he knows much better how and help him only when requested and communicate with him with respect even though he is so small and silent. Emmi Pikler work is very similar to Maria Montessori, both liked the idea of Jean Piaget that when we immediately say child the solution we take him the opportunity to figure it out alone. Doctor Pikler dealt just with children to the nursery age. This course included the evenings for parents without children, where we drunk the tea and talked about many problems and potential solutions to them. I don’t have a specific book to recommend. I read borrowed journals with article about Pikler-playroom and experienced theory in practice, but I think anything dedicated to this theory is worth reading.
We found useful using the sign language. I have three books to this subject: one with bit of theory and the most commonly used terms and two picture books that should be used together with a child, but we haven’t had opportunity to try it yet. Olivia chose from that quantity of things I showed her what she needs the most for us to understand her. She also adapted signing to her abilities or she just created her own expresions. I think it doesn’t matter, because the point was to improve the communication with her, which we did.