Let’s go, baby!
It’s serious fun for babies with a peekaboo game and baby pull wagon activity! Sally Wright, educator at the Kansas Children’s Discovery Center brings us these great ideas from the Discovery Baby program. We also got some help from our friend Becket and mom Courtney for this video, thank you! One skill Sally discusses in the video is grasping, an important developmental skill for babies, who move from a raking with their whole to using a pincer grasp with their thumb and forefinger in their first year.
Supplies:
- Shoe box or any type of box.
- Scissors.
- Rope.
- Tape or stickers.
Directions:
- Cut or remove the lid from the shoe box. If you have a regular box, cut the folds off.
- Poke a hole through one end of the box with scissors and guide the string through the hole. Tie a knot on each end of the string.
- Decorate the wagon by helping your child color, paint, or add stickers to the box.
Ways to expand it:
- Babies can begin to work on pulling a wagon at 6-7 months to work on raking with their fingers. They can pull the wagon around while crawling.
- When babies begin to pull themselves up and start cruising around, they will develop skills to be able to bend down to the ground and pick up a toy (like the string to the wagon). This is a developmental milestone. Babies can pull the wagon while cruising. Next thing you know, your baby is walking and pulling the wagon everywhere!
- Take it a step further and have your toddler pull the wagon while walking backwards.
How do kids benefit?
- Babies can benefit by utilizing this toy to work on pulling and grasping with their fingers while crawling, cruising or walking.
- Babies can have fun putting items in and out of the wagon, making it harder to pull, which can be a fun game! This game is beneficial for children from 6 months to toddler age.
Vocabulary
- Grasping: A baby’s hand development begins from the pinky finger, which is the strongest at birth, to the thumb and pointer fingers, which are the strongest within the first year of a baby’s life. Babies begin holding items on the pinky side of the hand, and hand coordination picks up around 3 months. At 6 months a baby will “rake” items with their whole hand. At 9 months to 1 year, babies will use their “pincer” grasp, using their thumb and pointer finger to pick up small objects.