First teaching Lessons

On one rainy day I cut out some pictures from ads and glued them to a brown grocery bag, with actual objects illustrated on the side. I wanted to teach him the correlation of the pictures with words, sound and objects. But this might have been a little to early for him -- he was more interested in chewing the objects at this point.



Still, I always put out a few objects while reading to him these days to help developing the correlation and object identification.



I also tried drawing with colored pencils and then handing him the pencils. He examined the pencils up and down, and decided chewing on them was more fun :-) A bit too early for art lessons...

He likes the game of Peek-a-poo a lot. This is supposed to help developing baby's understanding of "object permanence" concept. Object permanence refers to the understanding of the existence of an object when the object is not readily visible. Babies at this age are starting to grasp that, so they are fascinated to learn that you are behind the scarf when they can't see you. One experiment I tried was to put a toy under an upside down pot and a clear plastic container. He knows to flip over the container to get the toy but not always the pot. When he does pick up the pot, he is more interested in chewing the rim of it and forgets about the object under it. So it's not clear if he gets the Object Permanence idea there.

Here is a game that I was excited about. Like most babies at this stage, Andy loves sounds. I put in front of him a plastic container, the aluminum rice pot, and a metal pot lid, and started banging with a wooden spatula. He was fascinated with the sounds it made! After he watched for a while I handed over the spatula. He examined it a lot, moving it up and down, changing hands. It looked like he was going to chew on it, and I went out the room to get the camera in case he decides to make music instead. And sure enough I heard the banging in the other room! That was an exciting moment! He managed to bang all three. And eventually he picked up the pot to chew on its rim. I then showed him to bang on the "drums" with bare hands and he held his hand out and followed on the rice pot right away. I was proud.

Bigger pictures here.