I’ve found a really fun way to teach my toddler about the days of the week – months, years and even seasons. It’s a wooden educational calendar toy called Circa.

Small children don’t really have much concept of time – other than night and day, and that sometimes it’s warmer and other times colder. Life is one big game fest – ‘how long do I have to play’ (oh to be young again!). My two-year-old can say the days of the week; she knows that Wednesday is hair-washing day (yes – I do wash her hair only once a week!) and that Sunday is pancake/church day. But she has no concept of how long it will take to get to those days.

I want to teach her. Time may be irrelevant in her young life at the moment but soon it will become important (but never important enough to ruin the fun of childhood of course).

Circa – the circular calendar toy – rotating and circular stacking design is made to help children understand the cycles of the calendar. It’s all about learning through play.

Circa is divided into four pieces that represent a major cyclical event in the calendar: the days of the week disk; the months of the year disc – including a rotating seasons sub-disc; the days of the month disc; and a perpetual year dial.

Rather than being overwhelmed by the calendar as a whole, Circa allows children to learn about the components of the calendar separately – they can fit the discs together to see how the calendar toy comes together as a whole.

Continue reading →

How about measuring your child’s height by object rather than by centimetre? I sound like I am sprouting nonsense, right?

But really! It can be done. There is a super fun wall-mounted kids height chart on the market called “I’m AS Big As”, which starts at 1cm and reaches up 2 metres. It allows you to document your growth ‘by object’ and learn some weird and wonderful facts at the same time.

Are you as tall (or short) as: a gingerbread man? a squirrel? a hotdog sausage? a Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth? an Oscar? Napoleon? or Count Dracula? – there’s a different one for every centimetre.

My daughter gets a kick out of knowing that she is bigger than an ostrich egg and green woodpecker but is much smaller than a the yeti and an emu – and I have the best fun explaining all the references on the list.

It’s educational, interesting and simultaneously hilarious! AND entertaining; every one of my friends – young and old, great and small – cannot resist a quick measure on the kids height chart.

Continue reading →

I have to share an anecdote about my two year old daughter, who makes me laugh every day but some days more than others. Here’s just one example of the funny things toddlers do.

So… every morning, when her light-set-to-a-7-o-clock-timer turns on she gets out of bed (having been already awake for a while – chatting to herself and her teddies) and makes her way to our bedroom for snuggles, cuddles and conversation. My husband and I love this little morning ritual.

One morning my daughter made her way through to the lounge instead of our room. Now, in said lounge is usually the remnants of the previous evening’s ‘after dinner decadence’, which could be a plethora of any given treat – tea, coffee, hot chocolate, chocolate, sweets, biscuits (it’s a Pandora’s Box of tooth decay).

When Amelia didn’t follow her usual routine, and was dangerously quiet, we sent out a search party. Hubby and I discovered Amelia draining our tea cups with excited exclamations of ‘delicious’ (who knew that cold, milked, unsugared tea could be in any way pleasurable?) and scrounging biscuit crumbs from the table cloth.

There since my daughter always enters the lounge first before making her way to our bedroom, on the off chance that she might come across some of the treats that she is never ever allowed in her daily life.

Continue reading →

When you found out you were pregnant, one of the first things you probably did was get hold of a book or magazine that told you everything that was happening to your baby, week by week.

Once the baby was born, it was a different book, telling you when your baby should start to smile, roll over, eat solid foods. As they grew, your health visitor plotted their growth on a chart and asked you if they could pass little blocks between their hands and how many words they can say now.

Each stage is exciting but can also feel like a test of you and your baby’s abilities and achievements. Then before you know it, they are at school and you are faced with reading levels and spelling tests.

At each childhood development stages, you try your best to make sure that your child is progressing as you feel they should, but the difficulty is that, if you assume your child will do everything by the book, you might be surprised and even worried if and when they don’t.

It can even be tempting to compare your child with others: your child is on reading level 2 while their neighbour is on level 3, but your child is swimming 50 metres while others in their class are only swimming ten.

Continue reading →

Looking for toys with a difference? If so, P’kolino is definitely a brand to check out – the American-based toy company recently made its UK debut at the London Toy Fair, on the shelves of exclusive UK distributor Gander Kids.

The P’kolino range features a variety of retro-inspired wooden toys (rattles, tops, stackers and nesting birds), as well as award winning wooden puzzles and eco-friendly Arts and Crafts.

The Arts and Crafts range includes crayons and pencils which are coloured with food dye and angular-shaped so they won’t roll away; a stylish wall mounted Safari elephant easel, which releases the valuable floor space taken up by traditional easels; and Silly Soft modular toddler seating that’s part furniture, part toy.

Continue reading →