You don’t need expensive toys for your children to thrive in their home environment. Most of what you need is in your kitchen cupboard – or on your doorstep. Find out how everyday activities like making dens, pairing socks, going to the shops and reading, can provide your child with all the stimulation they need in their early years of life.
Have you ever sat and thought about how you managed to master a skill?
Young children love to move and soon after taking their first steps they often seem determined to unsteady themselves again. Children seek out opportunities to make themselves dizzy by spinning or tipping upside down, or to challenge their balance with swinging or rocking.
Have you ever noticed a baby concentrating on picking up a small toy? The small but skilled movements required aren't present at birth but babies quickly develop these fine motor skills. Fine motor skills is one of our six key streams of development in the My First Five Years app. Fine motor skills develop following on from the progression of gross motor movements. This is because fine motor skills require the strength and coordination of the gross motor muscles to operate smaller muscles in the body, such as hands, fingers and wrists.
Fine motor skill is something that begins developing as soon as your child is born, and children make numerous fine motor milestones throughout their early childhood. As they begin to experiment and master their new skills, there is a wide range of methods and activities that can support their fine motor development. Many ideas can be found for every stage of fine motor development on the My First Five Years app, as well as detailed breakdowns on each small stage of development along the way.
A relationship-based approach to childcare is one that is founded on a strong relationship between the child, childcare provider, and their family in order to support the best possible development outcome for the child.
It is common for children to develop skills at varying rates. Even siblings can hit milestones at different stages of development from one another.
You may have heard the Danish refer to the warm, comfortable and cosy feeling as ‘hygge’ pronounced (HOO-GAH). Our babies love a ‘hygge’ moment, and they can really benefit from these special times, as can you.
‘Gross Motor Skills’ makes up one of the six key streams of development here at My First Five Years. It's a skill that underpins and intertwines with many other aspects of early learning. There is plenty of activities that your child can take part in that will help to develop, with many able to be adapted to any child's level of development and interest too!
Fine Motor Skills are the skills that develop following on from the progression of gross motor movements. Fine motor skills involve intricate, more defined actions that require manual dexterity such as picking things up between a finger and thumb, wriggling toes and even the manipulation of lips and tongue.
Language is one of the six development streams at My First Five Years. Language is a skill that crosses over with and supports learning across all six of the My First Five Years streams.
‘Sensory play’ is something that a lot of children enjoy engaging in from a young age. Most people forget, however, that it makes for great learning opportunities for children of all age ranges.
I am a huge fan of balance bikes. I discovered them for my own children, 12 years ago. I had a 4-year- old that was struggling to learn to ride a bike and I hadn’t considered two wheels for my 18-month-old.
Our first interactions with our son Tom were not as we had anticipated. He arrived preterm at 32 weeks and caught us by surprise! He was whisked to the neonatal special care unit as he was not quite ready for life outside the womb. We followed behind and peered in at him in the incubator with a mixture of awe, excitement and fear.
Nursery rhymes are one of the most useful and versatile learning tools in the first few years of a child's life. They have often been passed down through generations and are one of the few activities that don’t require any equipment.
Traditional English nursery rhymes and songs, have played a role in early childhood for a long time. From the medieval “Baa Black Sheep” to today’s “The Wheels on the Bus,” the lives of young children have been enriched with verses and songs orally passed down through generations.
I thought it might be helpful to start this investigation into the importance of nursery rhymes by answering the question ‘What is a nursery rhyme?’
One of many wonderful things about babies and young children is that they really don’t seem to mind if you sing out of tune, or don’t remember absolutely every word for the songs and rhymes that you sing. That means that you can enjoy singing songs and saying rhymes with an audience who will think you are great even if you might be a bit out of tune!
Nursery rhymes are fun, joyful and often silly. They offer children a chance of learning at their own pace. The very nature of this can assist young children in becoming proficient readers. When hearing, learning, and reciting them children, not only enjoy the pleasure of words, but they also learn early reading skills. Phonemic skill development gained from nursery rhymes has even been scientifically shown to significantly improve reading, spelling, and other literacy skills. [1]
‘Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any other experience that reveals the human spirit’ - E.E. Cummings.
We so often get asked as a parent, "Are they good?"
Now, ask me that at 2:30pm on a busy Saturday in Asda following the mother of all meltdowns because I won’t let my child open the family size bag of Monster Munch!
Oh, there is so much fun to be had when singing nursery rhymes with young children! Some children love nothing more than to move around and have a feeling of freedom and energy. Many nursery rhymes are active and naturally promote the physical instinct of getting up and moving to the words. There is a natural beat and rhythm in nursery rhymes, offering the youngest of children the opportunity to join in by wriggling, bouncing, smiling and giggling.
When you become a parent, you often find that everyone wants to give you advice. This advice is often well meant but perhaps one of the first lessons that we learn is to choose which advice we take!
At My First Five Years, we spend lots of time talking about babies and children and how they develop and learn. We also talk about how, very often, parents are doing things that support their children’s learning without realising.
Many of us remember the moment our newborn baby gripped our finger for the first time. Your baby curling their fingers around your finger is one of several primitive reflexes which develop in the womb and are present for weeks or months after birth until your baby develops the strength and control to make voluntary movements. In this blog, we explore three reflexes that could be described as grasp reflexes and consider how these link to your baby’s development.
From the day your baby is born, they begin to learn about the world around them through their senses. Sensory play provides an essential foundation for children’s overall development. It is very important that children have the opportunity to explore their environments by using all their senses, as this helps to contribute to healthy brain development through the growth of neurological connections. These are the building blocks of the brain. Our app has lots of ideas to help you support your child’s sensory development from birth. In this article, we explain more about why sensory development is important and you’ll find ideas to get you started with supporting your child’s sensory development.
For the first few weeks of your baby's life, crying is an important way for them to communicate their needs. They will, in the next few weeks, start to smile, look and move as a means of communicating but crying will remain an important part of their communication. In this blog, we will look at what is known about crying and young babies and some of the things that might soothe your newborn baby.
At My First Five Years, we know that babies, toddlers and children learn through play, but what does learning through play look like for your baby? In this blog, we will explore play and young babies, thinking about how you can play with your baby and how this play supports their development.
You might have heard people talking about heuristic play or have seen adverts for various different treasure baskets and wondered what exactly these people were talking about. In this blog, we will explore some of the ideas that underpin treasure baskets and heuristic play, and offer some suggestions about how you could use some of these ideas at home.
Sleep takes up a lot of your baby’s time and might feature prominently in your thoughts, as well meaning friends and family offer advice about your sleep and about your baby’s sleep. In this blog, we will explore some of what is known about your newborn baby’s sleep.
When we think about creativity, we often think about creative arts such as dance, sculpture, painting and drawing, but it is also possible to be creative in scientific ways. Creative-scientific explorations can involve problem-solving, testing an idea to see if it works or is true, investigating, discovering and inventing. Creativity was traditionally thought to be limited to a special set of ‘creative’ people, but we can all be creative given the opportunity.
If your toddler holds a toy brick to their ear, speaks for a moment, and then hands it to you, you probably hold the brick to your ear and immediately start a conversation with the person on the other end of the ‘phone’. I have lost count of how many imaginary cups of tea I have drunk or pretend cakes I have eaten over the years! We expect our children to pretend and expect to be brought into their play, pretend play is amazing and supports children’s development in many ways. In this blog, I am going to focus on the role of pretend and fantasy play in supporting cognitive development.
The great outdoors is a fantastic learning resource for young children, which can help them learn across many areas of their development. Water is a great tool to help with development and discoveries in many aspects of learning, including cognitive development.
There is nothing quite like being in the fresh air. There are so many proven benefits to being outdoors, whatever the weather.
The benefits of spending time in the great outdoors are not limited to adults or children. They also extend to new parents and babies. Taking a baby on outdoor adventures may sound crazy or overwhelming, but even small amounts of time spent outdoors will be wonderful for you, and your baby’s health, mood, and spirit.
What are our fine motor skills?
Whether you have a big garden, a small garden or no garden at all, doing some planting and digging together can be a great way to support your child’s language development. In this blog, we will explore a little more about how getting outside and gardening can give you opportunities to chat and support your child’s language development.
As Christmas approaches and we start thinking about gifts, meals, parties and the big day itself, many of us are increasingly aware of the benefits of sustainability during the festive period. Here at My First Five Years, we have been asked to participate in sustainable Secret Santa groups, donate gifts to those in need and whether we can help in any way to support groups who provide food on Christmas Day.
Going outside with your baby or child gives them the chance to explore the world in a different way, they can move more, notice changes in weather and see, hear and touch things that they won’t find inside. Playing on a hill provides a particular challenge and a unique set of experiences, in this blog we will focus on the opportunities presented for supporting sensory development.
Cardboard boxes can be hugely exciting. Have you ever wondered why children can sometimes get more use out of a box than the content of the box?
When you pick up a new baby or pass them to someone for their first cuddle, you often hear comments about making sure that you support their head! Your baby does not have the strength to control their head when they are born. But the ability to control their bodies starts at their head and moves to their toes so you will notice them holding their head steady and moving it to look at things quite quickly. In this blog, we will look at how your baby develops control of their head and the part that primitive reflexes play in your baby’s early head movements.
For many of us what we want after, or before, a hard day is a hug. Touch helps us to build relationships and to regulate our emotions. Your newborn baby has been aware of touch since around the 8th week of your pregnancy and will have felt their hands touching their face and mouth before they were born. Touch is one of the first ways in which your child learns about themselves and about the world. They use their mouth and then, as their physical skills develop, their hands, feet and body to explore and learn. In this blog, we are going to look at the role of touch in helping your newborn baby regulate their emotions and learn about the world.
Newborn babies just seem to cry, eat and sleep, don’t they? We know children learn a lot during the first five years of their life, and we are here to help you enjoy, support and follow your child’s individual journey. But does your newborn know more than they can show you?
In this blog, we will briefly explore some of what researchers think newborn babies know and what this tells us about how they learn.
Here at My First Five Years, we are book obsessed and we know that you as parents love to read to your children, but sometimes find it difficult to buy books they will love. Therefore, in this blog post we are going to be exploring books that you and your child can enjoy reading outside.
From jelly and ice cream and pass the parcel to party buses and cakes shaped like pirate ships, there are so many different ways to celebrate your child's birthday.
At My First Five Years, it quickly became apparent that children's parties are a hot topic when we starting talking about them, as we shared stories of party experiences with our own children and family members. We shared those moments of alarm when your child requests that thirty class members come round for a Spiderman house party, or asks for a chocolate birthday cake in the shape of Concorde! One particular incident that sticks in my mind is a team member recounting the emergency rescue of her five-year-old sister from a party bus!
As your precious child starts to grow, so to their motor skills begin to develop. When a baby is born, their muscle development starts in their head and neck. As they develop the ability to move and control these, they will then progress onto the large muscles in the body such as their core, legs, and arms. It is likely that when your child reaches the age of two, they will be able to walk and run, and their gross motor muscles will continue to improve and refine throughout their childhood.
Here at My First Five Years, we pride ourselves on having expert knowledge about every part of a child’s development. We have found that one of the most important parts of development to understand is ‘cognitive development’, also known as ‘the way that children think’.
Here at My First Five Years, we know how important it is to empower parents with knowledge about speech development. We consider speech to be one of the most important parts of a child’s development journey. It’s a process that begins before birth as your baby listens to the sounds around them in the womb! As your baby is born and grows, this development continues supports them to communicate as they use words to represent objects and experiences. Let’s not forget also that your baby’s language development is a source of great excitement for you, the parent; as they move from making sounds to the amazing moment when they utter their first word!
When you think of grammar, your first thought might be punctuating sentences in an English lesson or some discussion about why children at primary school need to know about fronted adverbials. (Whatever that means!) However, our understanding of grammar begins a long time before we start school, with even babies noticing and learning about the grammar used in the languages spoken around them.
Becoming a parent is hard. Part of what makes it hard is the unrealistic narrative about what parenthood should look like or feel like. Right from the start, you may be aware of the expectations of others around your behaviour and your child’s behaviour, from people you know well, or even people you don’t know at all. This may come in the form of advice such as:
As a parent, it can feel like there is constant pressure to spend money on toys for children. The choices when it comes to what toys are best for your child are impossibly endless, too. Is it better to opt for only wooden toys, or is plastic actually pretty fantastic?
The great outdoors is one of the best resources for developing creative play in young children. There are many areas outdoors that can be explored with your child, including your very own back garden!
Outdoor play can provide many rich learning opportunities for young children. It can include places to explore, new experiences and can help in the development of many skills, including social and emotional development.
When we think about tantrums, we often imagine difficult moments that can feel challenging for parents, and we can sometimes have a negative view of this aspect of development. Although we all agree that our children’s tantrums can be difficult for us as parents, we think that this period of development is positive and shows us some really important steps in our children’s development. In this blog, we will look at what is happening for your child when they have a tantrum, and how you can support them.
At My First Five Years, we know all children and parents are individuals, each with their own characteristics, interests and ideas. We are here to support every parent to notice and celebrate their child’s unique developmental journey, and to avoid the pressure of comparison. We know that being a parent is often full of joy, but it is sometimes hard work too, so we think about 'realistic parenting', which is linked to the theory of 'good-enough parenting’. In this blog, I am going to explain more about ‘good-enough parenting’ and why being realistic about your parenting might be best for your child and family.
Packing your hospital bag can feel both exciting and daunting. The items you see suggested can feel a bit strange when it’s your first baby. I always remember seeing ‘extra-large sanitary towels’ on the list and wondering why on earth I would need them (and then packing a few tiny ones, only to have to send my partner out to buy more when the time came).
The first few years of a child's life are when they are developing their early skills across many areas. During this stage, a child will be discovering all about themselves and others, and growing their social and emotional skills. During a child’s early social and emotional development, there are many factors that can have an effect, both positively and negatively. In this summary, we’ll be detailing these factors, that usually fall into two categories – environmental and within the child. We’ll also be detailing wider ideas that are good to know, like why children’s mental health is important, emotional changes as they transition in life, and how to help if you think a child is at risk.
We know that for most parents life is busy and finding time to dedicate to activities that support your child’s development can be tricky, particularly in the week when we may also have work to contend with. However, we also know that opportunities for development and play are everywhere! In addition, children benefit from being allowed to get bored sometimes and from discovering new things for themselves.
We’re not big Valentine's Day people over here at My First Five Years, but we do believe in love and the love of a good children's book, so what better excuse than to go over our five favourite books about love, whatever the time of year!
The term ‘messy play’ often conjures up images of primary-coloured paints splattered on the walls and children with jelly in their hair. It can just sound a lot like a way of handing over the contents of the kitchen cupboard and its surroundings to your child and leaving them to it. However, there is much more to it than the perceived chaos at the kitchen table!
A lot of the time when we hear the term ‘problem-solving’, our brain jumps back to the tricky maths teasers from our school days, and we immediately recoil a little. However, problem-solving is much more than number conundrums.
There is no one simple answer to this question. It can be explained as a child's growing ability to control their emotions, ideas, and behaviour in order to act positively. It is also the ability to adjust behaviour to meet the situation they are in or have been presented with. When children are young, they do not know how to regulate their feelings and they cannot make sense of their feelings or how to express them.
Children make connections and learn a lot about the world through their eyes and they will rely on their visual skills to recognise familiar people, make discoveries about their environment, and keep themselves safe.[1]
In this article, we are going to focus on sensory stimuli and tantrums, how thinking about sensory stimulation might help you to support your child during a tantrum and what you might do if your child seems particularly sensitive to sensory stimulus.
Join us as we tell you everything you need to know about social referencing, and why it could be important for your child’s development.
We all know the feeling of getting lost in a good book, when time seems to stand still and the world around us melts away. Reading and sharing stories with your preschooler creates precious moments that have a wonderful emphasis on connecting with one another. The invitation to enter a magical new world with the physical closeness of a very loved adult is extremely hard to resist.
Reading with children is a wonderful experience, and it is during these early years that children can develop a lifelong love of books.. When we read with our children as parents or family members, we can pass on huge amounts of enthusiasm about reading. Picture books are an excellent way to introduce children to reading; plot and subplot, goodies and baddies, mysteries to be solved and guessed at, heroes on missions, compassion, achievement, intrigue, resolution, and much more may all be found in picture books.
Story times present wonderful moments for shared experiences between you and your toddler. Books are a magical resource that can inspire ideas or transport you into a world far beyond your home. It is likely that your toddler has begun to have lots of interests, such as transport, dinosaurs or nature, to name a few. There will be plenty of books available that suit their interests and provide an opportunity to learn more about their likes and fascinations.
It might seem like a funny idea to read to a baby. You might think, “My baby can’t understand what I am saying”, “They don't know what the words mean,” or “They can’t hold a book.” Surely reading is for when they get a little bit older?
After having our first baby, my confidence plummeted. I remember my first night spent in hospital staring into a small plastic box feeling so unbelievably in love but so unbelievably out of my depth. I felt like it should come naturally but this tiny human being didn’t do anything according to the books I’d vaguely flicked through while pregnant. She didn’t follow any of the set routines I’d imagined while planning my harmonious maternity leave two weeks earlier in the office, she didn’t sleep no matter how many times I came up with new solutions and she definitely didn’t do what they’d described in my antenatal classes.
When there’s big news, we know it becomes almost impossible to avoid. And that means we might need to think about how to talk to our young children about it! The news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or other big news stories, might capture your child’s interest or make them worry.
As parents, much of what we feel when we think of our children’s behaviour is based on what we ourselves experienced as children, combined with the huge amount of information, advice and opinion at our fingertips. This, along with the examples of parenting we see day-to-day, has been magnified through social media over recent years. Understanding how to support children’s behaviour is one of the hardest parts of parenting, and in this article we are going to review some of the theories about behaviour which have formed the basis of child development.
As a parent, it can feel like ‘Fine Motor Skills’ is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot by experts, but never really gets explained all too well. You might know it to be an essential part of your child’s physical learning (which is most certainly is!), but what even is it anyway? Let’s break it down.
Cognitive learning is so important in early childhood, as scientists believe that the first five years are a particularly important period for acquiring information because the brain is more malleable for absorbing new information. The experiences children receive help neural connections to grow, and they are then strengthened through repetitions.
Parenthood didn’t come quickly to me and my partner James. We rode a hard and winding road to conceive, littered over five years with medical checks, unexplained infertility, failed IUI and rounds of IVF, before I finally fell pregnant with our twin girls. During this time I comforted myself by becoming a student of fertility – I studied books about infertility and IVF, and learnt the benefits of healthy eating, acupuncture and mindfulness meditation. When I took the happy call from the IVF clinic that my third try had worked and I was pregnant with twins, I could hardly believe my ears. Not just one baby but two!
Creating a language-rich environment may sound complicated. Thankfully, it’s not. It simply means ‘a place to talk’. It's the way you use your space to talk to your child, as well as the toys, books and activities you choose, to create a ‘language-rich environment’.[1] Every response that is given to your child, whether that be a comment, a repetition of what they have said, or a new conversation with lovely words your child may not have heard before, can be defined as language rich.
At My First Five Years, we know it can be hard to sift through all the information available online and find what you want to know to help you to support your child. That’s why we provide information you can trust, backed by years of experience, science and research.
At My First Five Years, we believe in being realistic about parenting. We know what parents do is important for their children’s development, and we know parenting is amazing at times but hard work too.
When we think about child language acquisition, we are thinking about how language is gained and how it is developed. As soon as babies are born, they interact with the people around them, and their journey towards learning and using language begins.
Figuring out how to best support your child as they learn about the world and themselves can feel complex at times. As a parent, you can be bombarded with advice, tips and tricks that you may or may not agree with or want to use with your child. An area where people can be the most vocal about ‘handy hints’ is supporting your child’s behaviour, and the ways to respond to what are perceived as ‘negative’ behaviours. A technique that has caused some debate between parents, families and experts is something that is known as the naughty step.
I’ll be honest, I write for My First Five Years as a freelancer and have also been an early tester of the app because I have a three-year-old son myself. So, you won’t be surprised to know that I recommend this app to everyone I meet with young children. However, for a while, as a busy working mum, I wondered whether I’d prefer the app to just contain lists of simple-to-set-up activities that I could search for and randomly try when I had a spare ten minutes to play.
Mud is possibly one of the most versatile resources your child can play with – and it’s free! As daunting as the prospect of adding mud to play can feel, it is also fun for grown-ups to get stuck in – even Dolly Parton sang the praises of mud at Glastonbury, getting her fans to chant along with her, “We can’t get enough of the music and the mud!”
In the early stages of becoming a parent, the learning curve is steep, and the tiredness levels are so high. Your whole world becomes a slightly foggy bubble of baby baths, naps and nappies, leaving little time for much else.
The Lullaby Trust has restated the importance of following safer sleep guidelines in response to news reports about a new study which investigates possible causes of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Getting started with breastfeeding can be difficult, and we are sure that you would have heard (or even experienced with a prior baby) some horror stories about breastfeeding going wrong. Below are some tips and some useful information to get your breastfeeding journey started on the right boob (ha ha, see what we did there!).
Before having our baby, I had fully intended to breastfeed. It was really important to me, I had breastfed before and knew the benefits. But two weeks and numerous extra visits from the midwife later, I realised that, actually, the most important thing was that our baby was fed.
How do you feel about handwriting? Is it a traditional art or something that is still relevant today? Our own handwriting often feels very personal, tailored to our own unique style, which makes it a part of our self-image and even an expression of our personality. I remember spending a long time perfecting my signature! Handwriting is an important way of communicating and expressing language, and just like speech, it also leaves a lasting record. It is a physical way of expressing thoughts and ideas and communicating with others. When your child masters writing their name or their first sentence, they may feel extremely proud to have made (and left) their mark and this may feel like a really important rite of passage.
Last week was baby communication week, with a focus this year on listening to newborn babies.
I am sitting in our front room, half-dressed as a princess (I cannot fit the costume over my head properly so it is currently looking like a synthetic, glittery straitjacket for misbehaving grown-ups). My three-year-old is serving me plastic cake from a small red plate. I say serving me, often he is insisting that I put the grotty-looking thing into my mouth and when I resist, he shouts toddler obscenities at me. He’s like a very pushy parent (?) and I am counting down the minutes until I can escape and make a cup of tea, or put the washing away, or do anything other than another second of this role play.
I’m Cath, one of the My First Five Years content team. Before joining My First Five Years I taught under-fives for 25 years, so my working life has been filled with play. At My First Five Years, we are all about information for parents supported by research, so what does the research tell us about playing with our children?
You’ll hopefully know by now that here at My First Five Years we are all about play. But you might be surprised to know that play is definitely not just for children. There are many scientific studies that have researched the importance and power of play for all ages. Dr Stuart Brown, a leading researcher on play, says that “we are built to play and built by play,”[1] and according to Scott G. Eberle[2] (editor of The American Journal of Play), “We don’t lose the need for novelty and pleasure as we grow up… play brings joy. And it’s vital for problem-solving, creativity and relationships.”
When you prepare for the birth of your baby, you might enjoy shopping for tiny babygros and outfits, and carefully folding them away as you wait to meet your baby. It can be hard to imagine how quickly your little one will outgrow their first set of outfits, and their second, and even their third!
Amy Borg, our guest blogger, shares her advice on how to make a long car journey far more bearable.
The country will pause to mark Remembrance Day this Sunday, so we’re looking at ways to remember with young children.
Reading helps children learn language in ways they can’t through speaking alone. Choose books with rhymes; they are fun to read and develop language skills. Since I don’t speak like Dr. Seuss at home I made it a point to read rhyming books to my kids. Reading also builds vocabulary. In fact, children are exposed to 50 percent more unique words in books than in television shows or adults’ conversations.