My Christmas memories involve a lot of creating and crafting. It felt as if our dining room table was just as frequently a crafting table as it was a place for eating. It was often covered in pine cones and jingle bells and cinnamon cutout ornaments and ribbon. I look back on it all pretty fondly now. We would create amongst ourselves all season long, but it was also something we would casually invite friends to join us in because while cookie decorating is fun, one can only consume so many of those. All of this is simply to say that creativity has become deeply entwined in the way that…
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Yogurt Cups for Play Based Learning
Play based learning doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. And much of the packaging for the food we buy can be repurposed for creating some simple learning materials. Yogurt cups are a perfect example of this. I began saving these when Graham was about six months old. I’d throw a stack of them into our diaper bag and we’d have some lightweight building blocks to stack whenever we needed them. (Well, at that point I would stack them and Graham would knock them down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.) I’ve become a bit of a Chobani purist simply because I’m so grateful for the thought behind their packaging. This post might…
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8 Prayers to Pray with Little Ones
The habit of prayer is something that I’ve been striving to better cultivate in my own life and that I wanted to invite Graham into as well. I value the way that prayer invites us to a place of gratitude and how it recenters us as we request that God work in our hearts and lives to make us more like Him. The prayers gathered here are rooted in these two particular aspects because I think they’re a solid starting foundation for introducing children to prayer. One of the greatest obstacles for me about instilling rhythms of prayer in my own life has been simply remembering to do it. Meal…
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Free Greeting Card Printable
Teaching Thoughtfulness Alongside Creativity As I shared in my thoughts On The Importance of Creativity, creativity does not need to always be about productivity. It’s about the process of creating and what that process does in us. And sometimes the focus on the end product can get in the way of that. That said, it also seems like a waste to have all of our children’s artwork sitting in piles around the house. And there’s only so much space on the refrigerator. There’s a sweetness to children’s art, as if their innocence somehow comes through even there. With my own child and the little one I nanny, we’re currently in…
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Nurturing a Whole Child in Social Growth
As humans, we are designed with a desperate yearning to belong and to matter. This belonging and mattering looks different throughout the various chapters of life, but the need remains consistent. We want to be wanted. When our needs for belonging and connection are met, we find a sense of safety and purpose. As our social circle forms and expands, a sense of our individual self emerges. This understanding of self is deeply intertwined in our relationships to those around us, what we offer, how we feel received by others, how secure we feel. Our social health is significant because it holds quite a bit of sway over the contentment…
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Nurturing a Whole Child in Physical Growth
“Children, more than ever, need opportunities to be in their bodies in the world—jumping rope, bicycling, stream hopping, and fort building. It’s this engagement between limbs of the body and bones of the earth where true balance and centeredness emerge.“ —David Sobel Throughout history, humanity has seemed to wrestle a great deal with our physicality. Some have tried to deny it altogether. Some have deemed it “less than” the other aspects of our humanity. Some have given perhaps too much power to the physical self and its preferences. There’s certainly a delicate balance to living in appropriate relationship with our physical selves. But it’s an undeniable aspect of being human…
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Nurturing a Whole Child in Mental Growth
I began this journey with thoughts on mental growth that were somewhat synonymous with a notion of “book smarts”. I assumed the best thing I could do for Graham was teach him the alphabet and numbers and read to him everyday. My vision for his mental growth was clouded by all that a child “should” know. But I’ve come to believe that while there is nothing wrong with teaching the alphabet or other learning fundamentals, I was sometimes pursuing those clear milestones over embracing the intellectual development my child was naturally inclined towards. And I discovered that it was possible that my understanding of a child’s intellectual capacity was far…
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Nurturing a Whole Child in Spiritual Growth
When I set out to find resources for nurturing development in children, most of what I encountered had to do with their mental or physical development. This was to be expected. But the more I researched the more the imbalance began to strike me as uncomfortable. There was seemingly a strange, unspoken pact to isolate the mind and the body for cultivation and to ignore the soul entirely. That’s bound to have some long term consequences. Every aspect of our personhood is vital, but it awakened quite a bit of concern in me to imagine what happens when we ignore this spiritual component altogether. I believe concern is the right…
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Nurturing a Whole Child in Emotional Growth
“So often children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes. Yet, us adults have them all the time. None of us are perfect. We must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves.“ —Rebecca Eanes It seems we have slowly but surely begun to quiet bits and pieces of what it means to be human because we find them inconvenient, difficult to understand, or beyond the realm of our control. But we are naturally feeling creatures. Our feelings can’t be isolated or separated from the rest of us. For better…
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A Journey in Nurturing a Whole Child
This series of thoughts on whole childhood began as a real time documentation of our learning process and reflections through our first year with Graham. I felt so overwhelmed from the beginning that I would fail him unintentionally by my simple lack of knowledge in how to nurture his proper development. I knew that I wanted to nurture the whole of him, equipping him with resources early on for connecting with his emotions and creativity and spirituality. I knew that I wanted to instill a love of learning and a heart of compassion. I knew that I wanted him to have an appreciation for nature and the physical world, as…
