Besides playing with his toys, there are also some games which he loves to play nowadays. These are two of them:

Ball Passing Game

Using a plastic ball, we will pass it to and fro with Darius. He enjoys this activity with us and will occassionally smile or even laugh when the ball rolls towards him, especially when we make the ball bounce or create some funny noises during the game.

When we first started off with this activity however, he didn’t have good control in his throwing/rolling motion and the ball would often ended up in all directions. Over time, his control has improved and he can now be quite consistent in rolling the ball towards the direction he desires.

One interesting thing we noted is his method in ‘throwing’ the ball, though ‘letting go’ might be a better way to describe it. Instead of putting his palm down close to the floor and making the ball roll towards a specific direction, he will just drop the ball while at his shoulder’s height. Surprisingly, his accuracy of making the ball go the correct direction using this method is quite high, though soon our neighbours below will be coming up to complaint about the noise created by the dropping of the ball. ^^|

This game is useful for his gross motor skills and is also a good way to foster our parent-child bonding.

Item Experimentation Game

This is a solo game which Darius has recently grew to be very interested in. The item in this activity can basically be anything, for example, his toy drum or just any of his toys.

What he does is to pick up the item, examine it a bit, before dropping it, and then reaching and picking it up again. This can go on and on for long periods of time, involving more variations such as pushing, hitting or rolling the item. If the item goes out of his reach, he will often crawl towards it to reach it. However, there are also times when he will just give up on retrieving the item if it’s too far and just redirect himself towards another toy. ^^|

This game is useful for his gross motor skills and of his learning of cause and effect.

Related posts:

1. Darius Learns to Dribble Even before Darius has started to walk independently, we already...