Social development milestones

It wasn't too long ago that we were worried about H's social skills. He seemed to like playing on his own and never spoke much about his friends from school. Of late, he seemed to have blossomed socially. He voluntarily tells us about what he did in school, about his friends, etc. He even has best friends now whom he speaks about. I guess we were just overly paranoid. Children's social interactions develop in stages, and I found this article by Joan Almon extremely enlightening.

I quote from her article The Vital Role of Play in Early Childhood Education:

"The way children engage in social play with others changes over the years. The one year old tends to play alone, while social play of two year-olds is generally called parallel play for young children play side by side without fully interacting with each other. I would characterize the play of three and four year olds as playmate play. The children enjoy playing with each other (with occasional squabbles as part of the play experience), but generally they are not deeply invested in each other. They enjoy playing together when they are in nursery school, but tend to forget about each other when they are apart. An exception to this, in my experience, occurs among children whose families are friends or who carpool together. In such situations, life thrusts the children together outside the usual play times, and playmates become more like family members who play an important, abiding role in a child’s life. Normally, however, children of this age happily play with their playmates in school and forget about them for the rest of the day.

 

The social play of five and six year olds is different. The doors to deeper social relationships are opening for them. They form friendships and talk about their friends at home. They think about their friends when they are apart. They may want to call them on the phone or visit in their homes."

 

H is turning 5 so I guess he's starting to display the social characteristics of a 5 year old. It's rather sad that we have to pull him out of school at the end of this semester now that he has formed firm friendship in school. He actually wanted to stay in his current school but that's another story altogether.

 

 

Our new aquarium

Over the weekend, hubs took the kids to the pet shop to get them fishes as pets. I think daddy was more excited than the kids. While he was busy looking through the different aquariums, pumps, etc, the kids only wanted to use the net to scoop up the fish. What is more fun then netting the fish right, who cares about what aquarium we're buying.

We finally got all the required accessories home and got the aquarium all set up. H was pretty proud of the aquarium as he helped decorated it. Now it was time to get the fishes (we didn't get them from the same shop). We got 6 guppies, 4 swordtail fish and a mudsucker (the kids named it Lulee). Apparently these are hardy fishes but they don't come cheap. I thought guppies are longkang fish no? They cost RM5 each, I kid you not, what a rip off!

After putting all the fishes into the aquarium, daddy started giving rules to the kids. Alamak, so many rules!  

#1: Cannot put your hands into the fish tank or the fish will die
#2: Cannot put dirty things into the fish tank or the fish will die
#3: Cannot give the fish too much food or ... etc etc.

But the kids were so excited they nodded anyway and repeated the rules to daddy.

The next morning though, kakak found all the 4 swordtail fish on the floor dead. They must have jumped out of the tank, and 1 guppy dead in the tank. So much for them being hardy, and there goes RM25. I guess we'll have to go to the pet shop again this weekend to get more fish ;-)

This is what Hubs found out from his research before we bought our aquarium:

1. The bigger the aquarium the easier it is to keep the fishes alive as more water means less drastic change in water temperature
2. For beginners, you should choose hardy fishes like guppies or swordtail fish. Also, not all fishes can be put together in the same tank, so better check with the pet shop staff
3. There's a minimum space requirement for the fish (depending on their size) so although our tank can hold 10 gallons of water, the maximum number of guppies we can have is about 16-20