I have been reading a book called Raising Respectful Children in a Disrespectful World by Jill rugby (ISBN# 978-1-58229-574-9). It was suggested by Dr Laura Schlesinger. People either love her or hate her. Anyway, it is a really good book. She talks about how respect is going away in this world. If you raise your children to respect others, then they will respect themselves. This will cause them to respect morals and values. It is a really good book. One thing I really got out of it was creative things you can do with your children. She had a suggestion of imagination time. You can do anything during this time. One thing she suggested was saving old oatmeal boxes, cereal boxes, just anything you were going to throw away and make stuff out of it with marker, crayons, or whatever you want. It sounded fun.
Kofi and I started doing imagination time. He loves it! Some of the things we have done are:
1. We have a play tent in the playroom and we turned off all the light in the room. We lit a candle, and I played "The Sounds of Nature" CD. It had music of the ocean, birds, the wind, rain, etc. We pretended like we were camping out. Then, we read stories in the tent and played board games like: Junior Scrabble and Guess Who. We tried to make a house out of a deck of cards, but it was kind of hard in the tent. It was so much fun! My back hurt after because the tent was kind of little for me. This made Kofi do his homework quicker, so that we could have time for imagination!
2. Another thing we did was make animals and objects out of paper. I found this book that showed you how. We tried to do it. Some of it was hard! I was able to make a swan.
3. We made up a story and we acted it out.
4. We had a spa day. We took turns doing spa things: soaking our feet in my little foot soaker, doing pretend manicures, putting these little soaks on our eyes, putting lotion on. It actually was really fun. Kofi said, "Now this is the life".
It has been so much fun. I highly recommend the book. She also discusses being "unplugged" from electronic devices. Let your imagination work.
If anything, you get quality time :).
3 comments:
Today the quote on the chalkboard in Avry's class was... Imagination is better than knowledge. Some kids have such big imaginations naturally and with other kids it has to be developed more. I like your creative imagination ideas. Avry would love the spa day idea since she's one of those kids whose imagination goes crazy with a little inspiration.
IPUNA! What an awesome mom you are! That stuff sounds soooo cool! You make me excited to have big kids, sometimes Im so sad to have them grow up!
And I just have to say I can't stand Dr. Laura!!! OH gosh, just her name drives me nuts! Ironic SHE would have a book about respect, she is soooo judgemental and disrespectful, but anyway, glad you're getting good stuff from it. Thanks for letting me vent!
Some reason I knew you would say that Chanel. You are so funny. She does have some good in her. I love your honesty.
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