1.   Collecting autumn leaves is a gift to the people that live here. On your next leaf collecting expedition, tell your children that they are gathering leaves for a special project. When you get home, tuck them away in a cookbook. When Thanksgiving comes, what lovelier table decoration is there than the beauty of autumn? Remind your children that they helped create this beauty with the special leaf-collecting project of weeks ago.


2.   Frozen peas work wonders just before a meal. It’s taking longer to prepare dinner than you thought, and the children are hungry. Put out a bowl of frozen peas. The children love the color, shape and crunchiness. And by the time dinner is ready, they have eaten their vegetable.


3.   Remember those little corncob holders? Besides holding corn on the cob, they make excellent servers for children at mealtime. A child’s hand can easily pick up this little corncob, poke the pickle, sliced apple, or cheese and serve himself. It encourages taking just one and is much neater than using one’s fingers. They are inexpensive and in the utensil section at grocery stores.


4.   This story makes sense out of the mechanics of zipping for the young mind. The single tooth of the zipper is the train. The slide and the bottom stop are the two tunnels. Explain to your child that the train has to go through TWO tunnels before it can go up the mountain. Always check to see that the train has gone through BOTH tunnels. As the zipper zips, it’s fun to go choo choo as the zipper goes up the mountain and reaches the child’s chin.


5.   The holidays embrace the virtues of giving and sharing. And these are the virtues that children learn as they grow up. They see their parents sharing and giving of their time and expertise in whatever ways their worlds and careers provide. Children learn to walk and talk, i.e. essentially learn to ‘control’ their world. Their world includes their things, mainly their toys. Sharing one’s world or one’s toys is a letting go of control on that world. Sometimes (as adults we know this all too well) the ‘letting go’ is not easy, especially when we have worked to develop control.

What is helpful here for a child in learning the virtue of sharing is the guideline: "This is my work, you may use it when I’m done." The child is learning that sharing is letting another person use something and at an appropriate time. One is not asking a child to give away their favorite toy, nor to instantly stop using it so another child can.

Practice this concept with you child a few times so they understand how it works. Do a few role-plays with you child. You be a new child who wants whatever your child happens to be working with. Have your child say; "This is my work. You may use it when I’m done." Then reverse it. Have your child ask you for an item you are working with. Then you say, "This is my work. You may use it when I’m done." Role playing is a valuable tool in demonstrating a new behavior

You might even find it helpful for yourself. When you are wiping the table, for instance, and your child asks for the sponge so they can help – you want to get it done, but you also want to let your child help. Tell your child "This is my work, you may use it when I am done." Goal accomplished, actually many goals accomplished – the table is clean, your child can clean the table next, your child can help, and you have just modeled a peaceful way to share.

It was amazing for me the first few times I was directed to use this concept with children. I was a young assistant in a Montessori school and it was like magic when I used it or when I asked children to use it. Thirty years later when I introduced this concept to a new class of children, it still had the same effect. Some recipes always work.


6.   Now is the time to gather pinecones (not when it’s blustery cold.) Collect a variety of pinecones and they will come in handy for Thanksgiving and Christmas projects. If you can gather a lot, remember to use them for packing when mailing holiday presents. They are light and what a treat it is to open a box full of pine cones instead of styrofoam peanuts. The pinecones become part of the present as well.


7.   Watercolor is a beautiful art form. But children tend to forget to rinse their paintbrushes before changing colors, and soon the tray of colors is a blob of brown. The way to happily avoid this is by giving your child a small glass of water to rinse the brush in. (The glass has to be glass not plastic.) Show your child how to rinse the brush and then clink the brush dramatically from one side of the glass to the other, as if to make music. Children love this and soon the artists will be painting with well rinsed brushes to a symphony of water glass instruments. If there are several children painting together, put different amounts of water in each glass and listen to the resulting different sounds.


8.   It will help your toddler’s eventual reading success, if you put items that she uses on her left. Then she reaches to the left and moves to the right, the movement of reading. Thus in a kinesthetic sense, the child is internalizing a basic part of the system of reading. So whether it’s the bowl of mashed potatoes or the crayon box, put it on your child’s left. You will be assisting her in a subtle way for an essential skill.


9.   Is there an area in your house, down a hallway or around a corner, where the children tend to run and you would prefer that they walk for safety’s sake? Make a balance beam with a piece of tape on the floor. When the children are in that area, show them how to balance on the balance beam. Walk toe to heel, and stay as exactly on the line as possible. The children will enjoy the challenge. One might want to add a bit of pretend – how high one is on a mountain pass or how many alligators swim there,


10.  Conversation at dinner is an art and has to be cultivated as any art. Pleasant background music and insightful questions are conducive to conversation. Find the classical music station on the radio and put it on at a low volume – discernible but not intrusive. Holidays are an excellent source of meaningful questions. November – what can we give thanks for, why do we give, where did Thanksgiving come from, what would it be like to live at that time, etc. December – what present would we like to get, what would be a great present for… what presents would be fun to make, are just a few. Remember this interviewing tip – always ask questions that begin with who, what, where, when or why. One cannot respond with a yes or no to these questions. One has to converse.

Link to December