MONTESSORI AT HOME: Activities for Babies 12-15 Months

Hello, my name is Ashley and I am a mother of two girls. I have a three-year-old named Kylie and also a 13-month-old named Mia, so I've been doing this Montessori video series at

home

for quite some time. Now and within this series I also have a mini series in which I have been posting different videos with suggestions of activity ideas for different age ranges of

babies

and I started at the newborn stage, so if you have a newborn baby and you are looking for ideas on what to do at

home

Montessori style with your baby, so I'll leave you some links below to all the different videos so you can start from the beginning, but I also have videos of baby activity ideas. 3 to 6

months

6 to 9

months

9 to 12 months and my daughter Mia, like I said, is 13 months old and she's actually going to be almost 14 months old in a couple of days, so I thought it was time to move on and I prepared another video in this mini series for you so that you have some ideas of things you can do with your little ones at home, so from one busy parent to another today I am going to share with you the Montessori activity. ideas for

babies

between 12 and 15 months, so let's go ahead and start with a couple of activity ideas that you may have already introduced to your baby a little earlier, but I want to point them out today in a different capacity now, if you thought that Your baby was busy before he turned 12 or 15 months, so get ready, buckle up because you're about to double or even triple your speed.

Babies at this stage are incredibly focused on all their motor skills for many years. many of them have just started to walk or maybe they have been walking for a while but they move with those two little feet sometimes they run from one side to the other they climb on everything and in addition to all those big gross motor movements, they are also starting to focus on what they can do with these magical hands and fingers, so those

activities

that you've already introduced to your baby now is the time when you're going to really start working on truly mastering the purpose of the activity instead of just draw her in and find out what the possibilities were, for example, if you've already introduced your baby to a large puzzle with bumps and multiple shapes in the past, you could have seen them taking out the pieces at random and maybe trying to put them back together, but now is the time when you will see your baby really understanding that that puzzle piece needs to fit in that hole and you will see much more precise movements and efforts to place the piece in the right place.

The same goes for musical instruments. A baby may pick up random instruments and shake or bang them on the floor just to see what they would do in the past. now actively using instruments correctly, even instruments that have more than one piece that go together For any baby learning to walk during this period of time, a walker is an essential piece of equipment that all babies love to have and it really helps them work on those gross motor skills to help them master independent walking and if you haven't already introduced your baby to a language basket that I mentioned before in other videos, it's just a basket full of real objects that are all in the same category for example kitchen utensils where it can be a basket that contains small figures of things like animals or cars or plants, whatever, if you have not yet introduced one of these linguistic baskets to your baby now would be the time to do it because between 12 and 15 months babies have a language explosion, they are really beginning to truly understand, that is their perceptual language, they understand what it is that you are saying when you are conversing with him or her and this is also the time when Many babies begin to pronounce their first words and that is their expressive language, so having a language basket on hand is a great way to teach them different types of vocabulary that you may not use in your normal daily conversation.

It's also a good time to start playing with a three-period Montessori lesson if you've never heard of a three-period lesson before. Basically, the first period of a three-period lesson for teaching a child vocabulary is simply naming the objects, so. I'm willing to bet that many of you at this point have already been doing that naturally and that happens when your child picks up something from the language basket, say a cow, and holds it up and you say it's a cow, that It is the first period. So if you've already been doing this successfully and are starting to notice that it almost seems like your baby knows what some of the names of the objects she's been talking about are, this is where she can start playing. with the possibility of moving into period 2 with your baby and period 2 is where you ask your child to show you or point to one of the objects you have named without telling you what it is, so if you have the basket in front of you and you have farm animals, you can look at it and say can you show me the cow or can you point to the cow and her baby?

If you really understand what that word means, you should be able to do it very accurately. He will reach out and take the cow without any problem and maybe even show it to you now if you experiment a little with period 2 with your baby in the third period lesson and say, "Show me the cow" or can you point to the cow? the cow and your baby choose the wrong animal in the basket or the wrong object whatever your category it is important that you do not correct them or tell them directly that they are wrong you do not want them to feel ashamed or stupid for choosing the wrong thing because, after Everything, they are just learning these words and you want them to have a good start where they feel good, so if you say to your child: can you show me the cow? and he, instead, takes the horse. for example, you would tell them that's the horse, can you show me the cow and give them another chance to get it right if they choose incorrectly once again?

I wouldn't press the issue at that point, I would just tell them yes, you are holding the pig or whatever animal they picked up and I just make a mental note to reteach using period 1 the name cow next time, so that would be period 2. of a Montessori period 3 lesson and this is actually a great age to start experimenting as your baby will most likely not be ready yet for the third period of a three period lesson which is basically like the test or quiz phase where you point to something and just say what is this and then they have to say cow back, because this is the time when most babies are just starting to say their first words.

Chances are, that particular word isn't in her vocabulary yet, so you should wait until you know she's in front of you. Moving on to that stage, a good rule of thumb for this is to not move on to Period Three at all unless you are almost 100% sure, without a doubt, that your baby knows that word and probably isn't going to know it. Get it wrong if she asks them because she always wants to set them up for success. Well, the rest of the

activities

I'm about to share with you are new activities that we haven't talked about before and they are all wonderful things. which 12-15 month olds will be very interested in doing.

You'll notice that a good portion of these activities are practical life activities because this is a good time to start introducing them to your 12- to 15-month-old. They are very interested in what you are doing around the house and whenever you notice that your child is showing interest or is actually trying to get involved in some way, that is your cue to invite them. Would you like to help me unload the dishwasher or whatever? the task is and let them do as much as they can and then thank them for their help. Yes, the task will take much longer than if you did it yourself.

Yes, there is a good chance that this will be the case. It will end up being much more complicated than if you had done it yourself, but that's not the point: the point is to invite your child and allow him to feel like a valued, contributing member of your family. It is important to make the distinction that these are not tasks you are assigning to your 12-month-old. Okay, they're completely voluntary, so if you invite your child because he seems interested in what you're doing and decides that maybe that's not the case after all. interested and walk away, okay, there's nothing wrong with that and I would say it's totally developmentally appropriate at this age, so again a good portion of these activities will focus on introducing practical life tasks to your child as they show interest, but there are also several that meet the needs of gross motor movement, in addition to mastering those fine skills, it is important to remember that when introducing these activities to your child, especially if it is their first introduction, you should not expect perfection.

They are learning and some of these activities may be appropriate for your baby right at that 12 month mark. You may notice just by watching them that they seem really ready for it, but there will be a lot of babies out there and yours could be one of them that might need a little more time before they are ready for the activity you are trying to show them, so that could mean that you present it and it's a complete failure, they don't know what they're doing and as far as you're concerned it's just a complete failure, that's their sign that they're not ready and you can postpone the activity and then maybe reintroduce it in a couple of weeks because, as we all know, babies are developing at lightning speed.

In fact, they could be ready in a couple of weeks, whereas today they are not, and I say all this because I get a lot of messages from very concerned parents who have children the same age as mine or have a child the same age. is the same age as someone else they follow on Instagram or YouTube and they wonder why their child isn't at the same level yet. I urge you not to compare your child to any other child on the planet. Your baby is yours. own person, they are on their own developmental trajectory and it is our role as parents to respect that and just remember that in a Montessori environment you are supposed to follow your child when all else fails, if you do it alone, you can't.

It could possibly go wrong because you're looking at what they're interested in, you're looking at what different types of skills they're working to master, and if you can provide activities that cater to those things, then your child is going to get exactly what they need, no matter how disappointing. that may be at some point, especially if we have put a lot of thought and effort into creating this beautiful and aesthetically pleasing activity for our child to do if they are simply not interested in it or if they are not ready for it yet, then there is nothing that you can actually do to force, coerce, or even encourage your child to be interested in doing that activity at that moment.

My best advice, usually, in those situations is simply time. and patience and there will definitely be some activities out there that no matter how much time you give your child, they will never be interested in them and that's okay, so those are all my Montessori activity ideas for babies between the ages of 12 and 15 months I will be sure to put links in the description box below to as many items or toys and activities as I can find in case you are interested in checking out one of them if you are looking for activity ideas for babies who may be under 12 months or older of 12 months.

I already have a ton of videos that you can watch in all different age ranges. I'll leave links to each of those videos in the description box below. below and if you're new to my channel, I wanted to let you know that this video is part of a much larger series called Montessori at Home, which aims to provide practical tips and advice for busy parents like you and me to implement Montessori philosophies in at home with your kids, so if that sounds like something you're interested in learning more about, then you might consider subscribing to my channel this way you won't miss any new videos because I upload a new one like this every time. week thank you very much for watching today and see you next time bye