What a big silence! I don’t hear my mom; she hasn’t looked into the room for a long time. What is she doing? She might be up to something! Wow! She is in the kitchen. There are so many things in the kitchen. A lot of fruit and vegetables in the basket. I know all of them. And several colorful bags on the counter. So many things!

What are they? Our little one would love to explore them, but mom is strict. First we need to go to the bathroom and wash our hands. That’s the way it goes. How do we do it? Water comes first, then we turn it off; let’s pat the soap in our hands, oops, it slipped out – very funny. We wash our hands carefully round and round, we wash our fingers and wrist. Finally, water can come again. It’s cold! Mom helps a bit and it becomes warmer. How did this happen? It’s very interesting, so we have to discuss it with dad later. He must know this better. The little ones are not free yet, we need to use the towels, too. Carefully we wipe our hands and we can go to the kitchen.

The question of why arises several times, we just need to answer them all. Let’s take a close look at the flour, sugar, rise, oil and all the other things there. We can touch the bags, the bottles. One of them is soft, the other is hard; there are light and heavy goods and the oil pours in the bottle. Be careful! Can we put our fingers in them? It is really interesting that all of them are different. Flour can fly, sugar is sticky, rice is very hard and it tastes brrrr … it is not delicious like that.

But now we need to hurry and make dinner. Mom takes a lot of potatoes, some are smaller, others bigger, but all of them are very hard and dark. Mom peels them. Their color changes and they get lighter. Let’s put them into some water and the small hands can wash them. Kids can help and give the potatoes one by one to mom, who cuts them with a sharp knife, and then we put them in the water again. A lot of fun! Find the whole potatoes and give them to mom. We can learn so much during this activity. The little fingers move and become more and more skillful, capable of fine movements. But kids’ attention and cognition skills also strengthen.

If you have some space, you can choose a small drawer and have a toy kitchen there – we can cook together like that. The little ones love to help, love to do things together with mom and dad.

Till the food is ready, we have time to clean up in the kitchen. Kids can give us things: the flour
container, salt, strainer, covers, spoon and so on. We put it here and there and the kitchen is tidy
again. Maybe next time we will try and put away the toys in the kids’ room, too. Mom and dad will surely help.

Find a place for the books on the shelf, let’s have a storage box for smaller toys and a place for bigger ones – kids will get used to tidy their room. They won’t need to look for things for a long time since everything will have their own place, they will learn the names of the toys and the usual place of the cars, blocks, balls, dolls and stuffed animals if they have a basket.

It is such a good feeling to have our toys in place. With these small steps our kids will start a long and joyful journey of becoming capable of observing, sorting things and logical thinking.

I wish you a happy and persistent attempt to reach that.
Kati Kárpáti

This article is translated by Emese Murin.
Click here for the Hungarian version.

Here you will find Katalin Kárpáti’s previous article: At home with mom – how can we help the development of our child?