For a peaceful home, for a peaceful world
Now that Easter Sunday is over – the food enjoyed, candles burnt down, gifts played with and copious chocolate consumed – I’m starting to think a bit more about Frida’s birthday which is just a week and a half away. How on earth is it possible that my baby is going to be THREE so…
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I had been thinking that Frida’s work space needed refreshing for a while now, but I hadn’t had a clear idea of what I wanted from it. Frida wasn’t showing a huge interest in her Montessori-inspired materials and was using them pretty sporadically, which to me was a sign that change was needed. Often when…
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In the 1970s an architect called Simon Nicholson proposed an idea which has come to be known as the theory of loose parts; that it is the loose parts in our society – items which can be arranged, manipulated, moved around, and redesigned – which empower our creativity. There is no rule about what these…
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I recently wrote about how I discuss art with Frida, and about our habit of looking at one painting a day and talking about it. I don’t choose which painting we look at, I just pick the next one in the pack, and today it was “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande…
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We have discovered some beautiful new books recently, and I wanted to share some of them with you. Two of our favourite new additions to our bookshelves are the Hidden Worlds books, Ocean and Forest. Each book is structured in the same way; double-pages with six big fold-out pictures, each containing a line of information about…
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Frida and I have been talking a lot about the weather at the moment! She is British, after all, so she has a LOT of weather-based small-talk ahead of her. To allow Frida to simply record the weather – and to encourage her observation – I made her a very simple weather wheel. I simply…
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Talking about art with young children is a wonderful thing to do. Not only does it encourage critical thinking, understanding of others and the world around us, observation, and expressing emotions and feelings, but it is simply joyful to spend time discussing something beautiful together. Time and again at the moment, I keep coming back…
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Frida has been working with threading and lacing materials for a while now. At 19 months she was threading beads onto a string, at 27 months she was using a lacing fox, and recently she has been using a lacing toy with beads. I have been thinking for a little while that she might be ready…
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I make no secret of the fact that we are not a screen-free family, although we were until Frida was around two years old. Her screen time is very much limited, and we do not have a television, but occasionally she will watch a short programme on the laptop. At the moment, the thing she…
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I recently renewed my Headspace subscription. For those of you not familiar with Headspace, it’s a brilliant mindfulness and meditation app (not sponsored by the way – I just love it). I hadn’t used Headspace for well over a year, and I was delighted to notice that there is now section of meditations for children.…
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