Doman Glenn: How to Teach Your Baby to Be Physically Superb
July 3, 2007 — Alenka | Posted in Book Reviews, To Be Physically Superb. 4 Comments »This book is a fabulous book for explaining how important the physical development is to brain development. It covers every stage of development up to school age.
February 11, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Hi Alenka,
That means that we can only get to outdoor play areas on rare occasions. I think she really needs more excercise but I have no idea of what kind and how to incorporate it into our daily life. Can you, or perhaps some other parents who are enjoying your wonderful site, give some advice on that? I am afraid the structure of our house makes the equipment for brachiation impossible to install, so it will have to be something reasonably “equipment free”. I have been thinking of putting on some music from different countries and letting her dance to it, but the idea still seems a bit raw and lacking some “deep and meaingful sense” 
. In a word, I would be very grateful for your input.
My daughter is 18 months old. We live in Northern Ireland – perhaps one of the wettest places in the world!
Thanks,
Anya.
February 14, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Brachiation ladder that is described in “How to get your child Physically Superb” is a free standing structure. We integrated our’s into the walls to safe space. However, there are other wonderful things that can be done as well!
One of my kids’ favorite’s – simple gymnastics high bar. Doman’s book has directions how to build one. We didn’t – we bought our’s on ebay. My friend went even further – she monitored craig’s list for a while, until some local gym was going out of business or renewing its equipment and she bought a whole collection of spring boards, high bars, gymnastic horses for her kids to enjoy.
Much simpler – is a mini-trampoline. A few minutes of going up and down really goes a long way. Try it – jump continuously for 2 minutes and you’ll discover an excellent and fast cardio-workout! I didn’t buy the kid-versions – they have too many weight limitations. We bought a normal adult’s mini trampoline, that is small enough, easy to store, easy to move around, and yet fits for everyone in the family.
We also built a balance beam with the directions from the Doman’s “Physically Superb” book. Very easy, lots of fun.
I have a friend with a beautiful cathedral ceiling and a loft – she used the beams in her loft, to hang rings and trapeze. She layered the floor with kid’s old crib mattresses, sofa pillows and kids enjoy hanging, having fun and exercising!
I was playing with an idea of installing a zipper line in a basement for kids to get from one side of the room to the next. Could be fun. Our basement turned out to be unsuited.
Oh, another great and probably the simplest: while our neighbors were ready to retire some wooden kitchen chairs, we were very happy to pick it up. My husband brought a long wooden circular beam, cut it in two, tied it up to the backs of the chairs and… voula – the gymnastics parallel bars!
Almost all doorways have a high bar of some kind. Kids room upstairs has a home-made one with home-depot’s closet shirt-hanging rod. We used closet’s rod and the mounting hardware from the same department. If it is able to hold my husband’s dozens of shirts and pans, it can tolerate some small kids. My five year old is still enjoying it without any problems.
My other friend is a goddess of pillows: she sewed leather encasing on some old sofa’s pillows and using it as mats, obstacle course building blocks, etc. I liked her idea, but since sewing leather is nowhere on my list, I just layed them across the floor and covered the ugly flowers with some nice solid colored blankets and comforters.
For home-made weights I used some simple cheap bags with two handles and zippers, put some sand into ziploc bags and fitted inside those bags. We carefully weighted them and treat them as free weights. Each is usually 5lb. Could be used for Olympic games, as building blocks or just for the sheer amazement of dragging around and lifting a heavy object.
We also rotate the items. We have a small crawling tunnel that we bring out and take back into a closet. At the end of the summer I bought an inflatable pool on tremendous sale and filled it with balls – kids just love jumping into our home-made ball-pit. Our neighbors were dismantling their old playground and we picked up a small slide that we tied up to the column in a basement. This is especially fun with a ball-pit – sliding into a sea of balls!
Step ladder seems to be endless entertainment: first it was simply a step-ladder forgotten after replacement of bulbs. Then we moved it closer to the sofa for stability – kids loved climbing up and jumping on the sofa. Then we moved it away from the sofa and closer to high bar – kids loved it even more – they could use it to crawl up on the high bar. Then we nailed a large and crude picture of a rocket ship and then it became the most fun – a faithful rocket right in our own basement!
Buying a climbing rope for the outside and suspending it from the ceiling – is tons of fun. I wish our ceiling was higher for a greater swing.
My friends recently found a special net, similar to the ones that army is using, and hanging it on the wall for the kids to climb up to the celing or simply from one side of the room to another.
Rope ladders are hard to climb. But my kids like it when I hold the rope ladder on the sofa, stretching it more horizontally, and they crawl sideways… always twisting and falling in the end!
What else? Some of our favorite “sports” activities do not involve any equipment at all! We turn on classical or modern music and dance to it, representing some kind of animals (jump, like bunnies, fly, like birds, swim, like turtles, run, like wild horses, growl, like lions, etc.), or things, or pick another theme. We do forward and backward rolls. We dance around with the scarves and hide underneath for simple hide-and-seek (for little ones), or elaborate ghost pretend games. We play Hide-And-seek and I was amazed how creative the kids are in a room, devoid in my opinion of any real hiding places!
With little ones we play “three little pigs”: build a “house” with pillows and blankets, our little ones hide inside, then come out only to be chased by the “hungry wolf pack” – roaring parents. Lots of giggling from everyone. Older ones still love this game, but they prefer fancier names – they are the firefighters, or rescue rangers, or super heroes on a mission – fly out of the “house”, save some poor stranded plush animal or pretend one, and quickly and really giggly escape from the roaring parent-villains back into the safety of a pillow-house.
Please share your own ideas and physical games! We’d love to increase our repertoire!
February 22, 2011 at 4:06 pm
Alenka, thanks a lot for all your ideas! They do sound great, but from what you are saying, I gather you must live in the US or some other place were houses have bags of space and wonderful things like large gardens and basements!
We here can only dream about things like that! Our 3-bed terraced house is nice and cosy and surely bigger than our flat in Ukraine, but it boasts no space for… well, nearly anything. Another thing is that walls have been moved by the previous owners, so most walls upstairs are simply partition ones, ie made of cardboard with a bit of plaster slapped on – you can’t really affix anything havier than a light picture to them. So, we’ll have to stick to the excercises requiring no or very little equipment. At the moment I am thinking of starting something like a small support group for parents interested in early learning, so that my little one can enjoy other kids’ company, as she has no siblings. Once I work out the structure of the meeting-class-play party, I’ll share it with you. Meanwhile, can you tell me if you ever organized or participated in any groups like that? It seems to me that wherever you live the attitude to early learning in general is completely different from that here. It seems that in Northern Ireland people treat early learning like a myth, thinking that you can’t get a child under 3-4 (that’s when they start school here) to notice or learn anything good. Here we don’t have anything like the kindergartens with Montessory-based sorroundings like the one I went to at home in Ukraine. Even the library doesn’t stock books that go beyond baby-massage or swimming for babies…. So, it will probably be quite a difficult thing to do, but I would still like to try and would be very thankful for any advice on this matter.
March 9, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Sounds like you are up against a very admirable task! Cardboard walls are quite common here as well, though in the state where I live space is less of an issue. As for the attitudes towards the early education – it greatly depends on one’s life-philosophy. While I was very lucky to find enough friends who share our dedication to the development of the little ones, I’ve got to admit, that most people I meet look at it as an extravagant personality trait. While here in the US we have a great body of literature, space, and enough Montessori schools (non of our surrounding ones actually made an impression good enough to let my kids attend it), while I can’t rave at the local park systems, playgrounds, story-time and music programs for kids, the idea that little ones are capable beyond reciting regular nursery rhymes and escorting their mothers on shopping trips is waaay too foreign for the majority of the parents. So while my kid was a toddler, every trip to the playground was a hunting expedition: can we fish out some like-minded parents, who share our philosophy, who will go great lengths for their children’s development? I succeeded to find enough parents like that. Funny thing is, few of them we ever knew before…
In the beginning I used to make educational playdates on monthly basis. I can share some scenarios/plans if anybody is interested. Later I reused these scenarios for the yearly parties – Halloween, New Year, kids birthdays. Now that all the kids are in school, we prefer to continue teaching our little ones “privately” and enjoy the time together for regular play-oriented activities. Simple playdates, where kids build Lego castles, create robot-adventures and moms chat, share the news, and the newly found educational materials.
All I can say – the enormous effort we put in, was truly worth it: my kids have like-minded friends, who don’t cringe from the word “reading” and whose parents don’t shrug their shoulders with a reply like “My boy is only interested in Sports Illustrated or Comics.” And I have a very close group of friends from whom I can learn and with whom I can share the successes and difficulties of our learning journey!
Please share how your own “learning journey” continues.