Walking, the most challenging large motor skill, seemed to be an easy milestone for DD. Within one month, she could manage to walk by herself with no support or help. Walking enabled her more mobility and freedom. It also helps build confidence and independence. Her baby training this month concentrated on walking practice, but also included language training and cognitive cultivation.
1. Go baby, go! Once DD, a risk-taker, tasted the freedom of walking, it was difficult to prevent her from toddling: she was eager to rise to the challenge of walking. My strategy was: go baby, go!
I tried to resist the urge to rush to her when she fell, since I understood falling is an inevitable part of learning to walk and she had to get three via practice. Normally I just stayed around her in case she was going to triple and really get hurt.
2. Let’s put the toys back: DD enjoyed littering her toys and books around the family room. Sometimes I had such an illusion that I was entering an abandoned playground where all the players suddenly disappeared.
At first I followed her and picked up after her. Soon my soar back told me that this was not a winning way, since her speed of tossing was much faster than my speed of bending down and picking up.
Therefore, instead of I did the work, I trained her. I showed her to pick toys from the ground and put them back to the container. At the same time, I explained to her the benefits of doing so. She watched and listened. I didn’t know whether she really got the idea, but she did imitate me and put the toys back to the container.
Of course she quickly forgot the training and she damped the toys out again. So I repeated the whole process and gradually I noticed there were fewer and fewer toys scattering on the ground.
3. The “face-naming” game: Our neighbor gave DD a picture book on how to name the body, such as eyes, nose, ears and etc. I pointed to my body parts when I read the book to her. Sometimes I pointed to her body parts and let her correspond between the pictures and the real things. I also showed her the presentation I produced on how to name body parts in Chinese.
Then I asked her where my mouth (or nose, or eyes, etc) is. Sometimes she put her fingers right in it, sometimes she directed to the wrong item. It didn’t matter. We had fun and she learned the language.
4. Snuggle and read: At this age, DD was still in what experts call the “passive” phase of language acquisition. That means she was soaking up all the words and speech around her, and filing the information away for later use. Therefore the more I talked and read to her, the better for her to talk later.
And she wanted to learn. She began to hand me books or throw books onto M’s lap. She enjoyed the intimacy of snuggling with us when we read stories to her, although she was not patient enough to wait for the endings.
Related posts:
Baby training, month 12
Baby training, month 11
Baby training, month 10
Baby training, month 9
Baby training, month 8
Baby training, month 7
Baby training, month 6
Baby training, month 5
Baby training, month 4
Baby training, month 3
Baby training, month 1-2
Baby Training, From Lina, Second Year | Lina | 
August 11, 2009 9:30 am | 
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