expat | Right from the Start

We have been in the US for 6 weeks but our furniture and the majority of the childrens’ toys will not arrive for another month. During this period we have become experts at finding things to play with from around the house. We brought a small selection of basic toys – colouring pencils, scissors, a glue stick, paper, a ball and a few books, other than that we have made our own fun. The other children in the street think it is strange to come to a house with no toys but if I am honest I don’t think there is a great deal that the children have missed.

I have been meaning to write a post about some of the household objects that we have played with for some time, but an article that I read yesterday made me look at it from a different perspective. Sadaf Shallwani’s article Questioning Play and Child-Centred Approaches discusses her experience of teaching children in Pakistan. Here, childrens’ learning was not built around pretend play but came from real experiences. Children would not learn to cook in a pretend kitchen but would be taught to use real kitchen utensils in a safe manner.

She also questions Western notions of child-centred education. Early educators try to see the world through a child’s eyes and provide child-sized furniture and objects. The value of using real objects is recognised in many highly-acclaimed pre-schools. The schools of Reggio Emilia use many real-life scenarios as the basis for their projects and a colleague who visited the schools was surprised to find the children climbing onto adult-sized chairs and tables. A key philosophy of the Reggio Schools is the belief that children are capable. With this in mind the teachers help the children to use real tools and objects. Similarly in the Danish Forest Schools that another colleague visited, young children were taught to use real tools and knives to whittle sticks and were free to roam in the woodlands and on the beach and trusted to return at the sound of a whistle.

I remember as a child using real objects from my kitchen to play shops and tea parties. Toy versions of everything are so readily available these days that it is easy to be drawn into the need to buy more and more. It is also easy to fall into the trap of believing that children need adapted versions of things for their own safety. If we trust them with real things, spending time explaining the risks and demonstrating how to use them properly, children are more safety-conscious than those who do not understand the danger of the real objects.

Not having toys has been a very useful exercise. We have used things from around the house and recycled boxes and paper to create an Olympics and a mud kitchen, we have borrowed books from the library and we have played ball games and skipping.

Here are a few other objects we have utilised:-

Pistachio Nut Shells

We saved the shells from our pistachio nuts and the girls had great fun decorating them. We coloured them so that we could make flowers and patterns and decorated some to look like ladybirds and other bugs. My 3-year-old chose some pebbles from the garden to decorate as they weren’t quite so fiddly for her small hands.

On another occasion I gave my 1-year-old the tub of shells along with a pan, spoon and a number of containers. She enjoyed scooping them and transporting the shells from one container to another. She also liked the sound they made as they fell onto the floor. As she walked they stuck to her feet so I showed her how to pick them up with her toes which she thought was very funny.

Coffee Filters

I remember doing this activity in science lessons at school. I gave the girls felt tip pens and coffee filters and asked them to draw patterns on them.

When they had finished they were given a small pot of water and I showed them how to drip it on to the paper creating rainbow colours.

Paper

We kept newspapers and magazines with a view to making papier-mache. The girls would like to enter a local parade on Saturday and I suggested they might be able to make papier-mache masks.

My 3-year-old had other ideas. She decided to spread the paper across the floor. ‘I’m making a bed’ she said.

She had also made other things for her house by sticking boxes together

I’ve often felt that my house has been taken over by toys that the children hardly ever play with, so I’m not particularly looking forward to them all arriving. I hope that being creative with household objects will help us all to think about what we could use instead of buying yet another toy and maybe I can keep most of the toys in their boxes when they arrive.

My new house in the US isn’t huge, it’s a fairly typical family home but over the past week I have felt myself walking around the house saying time and again ‘I love this house’. Why? Perhaps in part because none of my stuff has arrived yet so there is no clutter and some of the rooms are empty, it looks so clean and minimalistic which is very soothing. However, there is more to it than that, so much thought goes into the practicalities of a house here. Here are my favourites:-

Coffee Machines

The last few years have been a blur of late nights (unfortunately not partying) and muddling through days in a coffee fuelled haze. Since my pregnancy with my 3rd daughter I have become a big coffee fan. Coffee is big here in Starbucks land. Not all households have kettles but you can be sure they will have a coffee maker. The coffee makers are mess free as the coffee is contained in filter papers so no more trying to dispose of coffee grounds. Even better the coffee stays on a heated plate so you always have a hot coffee. No more microwaved coffee for me then, simple but genius.

2. Storage

There are fitted cupboards in every room of this house. By the front door is a coat and shoe cupboard, each bedroom has fitted double wardrobes and the large bedrooms have 2, there is a linen cupboard in the utility room, a double cupboard outside our bedroom, a huge cupboard outside our kids bedroom plus another double wardrobe in the adjoining room attached. When all our stuff arrives there should be loads of space to put the kids toys and general ‘stuff’ that I could never find a place for in the old house. Here’s to a new me with a tidy and organised house.

3. Bathrooms

My 8 year old is delighted to have her own en suite (this also doubles up as a utility room with a huge top loading washing machine and tumble dryer) my youngest 2 have their own bathroom and we have an en suite. Multiple bathrooms are common here – it would be considered odd to have only 2. Double sinks are in all the master bathrooms so no more fighting over sink space (the kids not me) and best of all are the multiple drawers and cupboards underneath the sinks. No more piles of toiletries or bath toys on view, they will all fit inside the cupboards beneath the sinks. My 3 year old removed all the toothbrushes, toothpaste etc. from her sinks a few days ago and put them in a drawer. It looks so tidy – I like what she is becoming (if we forget that she hid the soap). As an added bonus the bath in the children’s bathroom comes with a lever instead of a plug so there will be no more arguments about accidentally pulling the plug out.

The other thing I love about the bathrooms is that they have power sockets in them so my hairdryer and straighteners can live in the bathroom and the bedroom can be purely for relaxation.

4. Shower Curtains with Magnetic Bottoms

Okay, this one may be a little sad, but I love that our shower curtains have magnets in the corner that stick to the bath so you don’t have to worry about them flapping out of place and the bathroom floor getting soaked.

5. Huge Fridges

American fridges are popular in the UK but the door space is the biggest difference here. The gallon cartons of milk fit comfortably into the door space, I could easily fit 4 of them in. I have fresh produce and meat drawers leaving the rest of the space for important stuff like beer.

The recycling bins are huge wheelie bins here to cater for the giant cartons that go for recycling.

6. Fly Screens

We don’t need to worry about mosquitoes in the UK but in a house backing onto woodland we did have midges, daddy long legs and maybugs not to mention houseflies. Here every door and window has a fly screen so you can have the benefit of keeping the door open without the annoyance of flies. They wouldn’t have been very useful in the UK this Summer but they would have been great in the past.