We're delighted to announce the launch of our new app for iPhone, Shape Bugs, aimed at teaching preschool children to draw and recognise simple shapes.

If you trust your children with your iPhone or iPod Touch then let them choose a shape to draw.  They can select their favourite colour and must draw the shape as cleanly as possible - squares, rectangles and diamonds must be drawn with four straight lines, triangles with three straight lines and circles and ovals with one.  Don't take your finger off until the shape is complete!

If the shape is reconisable as the one you set out to draw, then you'll hear a cheer and a face will appear to make your Bug.  If the lines weren't drawn cleanly then you'll hear a comiserating 'Ohhh!' and can try again!

Download Shape Bugs from the Apple store, and have hours of fun...!

At ToucanLearn we encourage you to keep a daily diary for your little ones, but if you have children of a school age who can read or write, why not have them record a diary of their baby and toddler siblings?  A diary kept by a young child of their younger sibling would make for a fascinating account, you would get a glimpse of their understanding of the world and interpretation of events.  If your children are too young to be able to write, then how about trying to keep a recorded diary, making an audio or video recording each day?  It's really easy to make audio and video recordings these days, using mobile phones, smartphones or laptops or computers with webcams.

Keeping a diary of a young baby from a siblings perspective would make for an interesting project for you, but would become an invaluable record for your children in years to come!

It has been reported that teachers and carers who are afraid of spiders and creepy crawlies are stopping our children learning about the natural world!  Children are not getting involved with nature because teachers and carers are afraid of getting mucky from soil in the great outdoors and are too scared of insects to teach about them.

Experts have said that natural history and nature in general is not being taught in schools.  Not so for the childminders and parents who enjoy ToucanLearn! There are some great outdoors activities that introduce insects and teach children about their natural environment.  We don't agree with the 'don't get mucky'! philosophy of learning and teaching!  The whole idea is to get children involved.  Get them interested and inspired!  The muddier the better!

The Chairman of the Association for Science Education said teachers need more support to carry out experiments and take children outside.  Perhaps these teachers should join ToucanLearn!

He also said that Parents should take their children outside to enjoy the natural world, to learn where their food comes from, what grows in the woods and what goes on in nature.

So, let's take his lead, pull on some wellies, grab a magnifying glass and get out there in the undergrowth!  Have fun, explorers!

Many families don't have the luxury of a parent staying at home to raise their children, many families require two incomes to support themselves, and it's a sad truth that your childminder may see more of your young children than you do.  Given the amount of time spent away from your children, how do you know that they are in good hands?  ...that your nanny, childminder or nursery is really great with them?

Part of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) mandates good lines of communication between carers and parents.  It is important for parents to know what their children have been doing, what they are learning and how they are progressing.  ToucanLearn's Daily Diary offers one way in which carers can share their experiences with parents.  Nanny's don't have to follow EYFS but it is still good practice for you to develop a formal or informal way that lets them tell you what has been happening.

If you have doubts about the quality of your child care, you should raise it with the care provider in the first instance.  If matters remain unresolved, you can take complaints to OFSTED.  They will investigate not only people registered as OFSTED carers, but also people providing care services that aren't enrolled on their registers.  You can find out more about how OFSTED respond to complaints in this document.  Child services are, understandably, a hugely important and sensitive area.  OFSTED will take your issues seriously, and will work with both sides to ensure a high standard of care, and the implementation of best practice.

We've just launched two great new features on ToucanLearn - a more featured Daily Diary and the ability to share children between different ToucanLearn accounts!  Both of these features are aimed at allowing childminders and parents to pursue the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) even more easily than ever!

Daily Diary
Our new Daily Diary replaces the private blog space that we offered each child in the past.  The Daily Diary offers more structure than a blog, in particular:-

• Entries are presented by day and you can navigate through the calendar to see old entries
• You can write up your own activities, not just ToucanLearn ones
• You can link every entry to the EYFS
• You can log what each child has eaten during the day
• You can log accidents
• You can add future planning notes on future dates

The Daily Diary is fully compatible with the old blog area so anything that you have entered before remains in place and is just as accessible.  Over time we have further plans to improve the ability to pull out reports to allow you to see how well you're covering EYFS, pull out accident records and to extract your entries in a printed format.

Child Sharing
We've also launched the ability to share children between ToucanLearn accounts.  This is aimed at allowing childminders, parents and teachers all to share and contribute information against the same children.  Now parents can access the Daily Diaries put together by those looking after their children.  Child sharing is really easy:-

• Set up sharing in My Account -> My Children, each child entry has a 'Share' button; simply enter an email address and we will send an invitation to the person you wish to share each child with
• When that person logs into ToucanLearn they will be presented with a list of sharing invitations to accept or decline
• If they accept the invitation then they will have access to that child's activities and Daily Diary
• If they do not have a ToucanLearn account then they can simply set one up and accept the sharing invitations when they first log in

Everyone can take advantage of child sharing, whether they are a free user or a Premium Member, but there are restrictions for free members - you can only access activities and the Daily Diary for two children, if you need more then you should upgrade to Premium Membership.  Free users also only see a limited number of activities.

We hope that you find these two new features handy, and we look forward to adding even more functionality in the future!

National Family Week runs from 31st May - 4th June 2010 and is the biggest and most publicised celebration of family life.  It's an annual event and it aims to celebrate all things family, promote the idea of spending quality time together and it also advocates an active lifestyle. ... as does ToucanLearn!

National Family Week is backed by all major political parties, and it works with hundreds of partners and supporters to help support family life.  There are restaurants, retail companies as well as charities that support the project.  David Cameron, Terry Wogan, Amanda Holdon, Sally Gunnell and Ester Rantzen are amongst many all lend their support.

Thousands of events will be taking place across the country - many of them free of charge for children - in all sorts of venues.  The deals on offer cover all sorts of venues that want to encourage families to enjoy eating, learning, playing, exploring and getting out and about together.  The project runs throughout the whole of the half term week, see the official website for information on events, and access to lots of special offers throughout the week.

ToucanLearn is all about spending quality time with your children... after all, ToucanLearn (two can learn!) better than one.  An annual subscription is just £16 a year for hundreds of activities, games, crafts and ideas about how to entertain and inspire your children.  All the activities are age specific and great fun for everyone!

There's no doubt that the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) requirements place a huge burden on childminders and teachers, but linking your activities to the EYFS and planning topics in advance need not be as difficult as you might imagine.  Every activity you choose to undertake with babies and toddlers will have some learning benefits, and it's usually pretty easy to stretch activities to cover almost any of the areas of learning and devlopment.

Let's look at three basic activities, and see how we can adjust them to cover all six of the areas of learning and development.

(1) Finger Painting

Sit your little one down with a large sheet of paper and some poster paints, and ask them to create a 'picture' dipping their fingers in the paint and drawing on their canvas.  You can easily cover each of the areas of learning and development:-

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Have your little one include members of their family and friends that they see often in their picture
• Communication, Language and Literacy: Ask your little one to talk about the different parts of their picture and to describe what is going on
• Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Have your little artist add shapes to the picture, shapes, circles and triangles
• Knowledge and Understanding of the World: Include their house in the drawing along with one or two other landmarks that they know, such as where the shops, park or their nursery are
• Physical Development: Paint trees with big sweeping lines, and flowers with fine little lines; discuss how the paint feels on their fingers
• Creative Development: Dip each finger in a different colour and learn what happens as they drag their hand down the page, what happens if they wiggle their fingers at the same time?

(2) A Walk in the Park

Take a stroll out to your nearest park and observe what's happening around you, at the same time, covering all the areas of learning and development:-

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development: At the end of your trip, discuss what aspects of the walk your little one enjoyed; if you visited a play park, how did they feel on the swings, on the climbing frames and on other equipment they played on?
• Communication, Language and Literacy: Play eye-spy as you walk to the park, see if your little one can give accurate clues describing what it is that they can 'spy'
• Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Look out for and count things on your way: birds, letter boxes, trees etc.
• Knowledge and Understanding of the World: Talk about why you must hold hands when walking by the road, and why you look for cars before crossing the road; when you arrive at the park, ask your little one to recount your journey, the landmarks that you passed and the route you took
• Physical Development: Let them run around and play on swings, climbing frames and the other outdoor toys; if there aren't any, make up a simple chasing game
• Creative Development: Have them play make-believe in the park, perhaps they can be an ice-cream vendor doling out ice-creams to the children, or perhaps they can be a fire-fighter rescuing people from the climbing frame?!

(3) Make-Believe Restaurant

Set up a restaurant with your little one(s), pretend you have a nice restaurant, beautiful tables, and lots of customers.  Pretend to make and serve food, and let's see how we can fit it to those areas of learninf and development once more:-

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Have your little one greet the restaurant customers and show them to their tables; show how they can act politely to their guests
• Communication, Language and Literacy: Have your little one recite the menu to each customer and ask what they would like to eat - see how many orders they can make up and remember!
  
• Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Count how many meals need to be prepared; ask how they might entertain the customers while their dinner is being cooked?!
• Knowledge and Understanding of the World: Describe how different foods originate from different countries; have your chef name their favourite foods and describe where those foods come from.  You may be surprised at how many international influences they have been exposed to already!
• Physical Development: Give your little one a large hardback book to use as a tray.  Have them hold it on top of their hand and balance some toy food or other small items on it.  Have them walk around the room keeping the items balanced; add more and more items to the tray
• Creative Development: Have your little one go to their make-believe kitchen and make up the food orders.  Tell them what they must do and have them act it out: wash the vegetables, cut the onions, peel the potatoes, place the ingredients in a big pan on the stove and stir; dish the food onto plates and serve the customers!

All of the activities we present in ToucanLearn are tagged with the key areas of learning and development they support, we flag the specific focus areas within each area that they compliment.  However, with just a little bit of imagination, you can expand any activity to cover almost any of the areas of learning and development.

Why don't you decide on a theme to pursue each week?  It might be counting, shapes, colours, animals, countries or anything else. Choose a theme, and adjust each activity you undertake to fit in with the theme.  It's easier than you might think, and you'll have a lot of fun together at the same time!

Surely, once children begin to read or learn their numbers they should be doing that in their spare time, rather than playing?  This couldn't be further from the truth!  In fact, children that play tend to become better and more attentive learners on average, and what you must remember is that when chidren are playing, the are learning the whole time too!  This is what ToucanLearn is all about... sharing ideas of games, activities and crafts that are GREAT FUN, but we show you the learning elements too so you can see exactly what your little ones are actually learning about.  As they are doing the activities with you, they are learning even more (Two CAN Learn much better than one)!

Do you need special equipment at each age stage in order to encourage your child to play?

NO!  Play can involve anything (more or less!).  From wooden spoons and saucepans, to folded socks and a washing basket!  It can mean jumping in puddles to learn counting or throwing gloves to see how far you can get them or posting junk mail into a shoe box made into a letter box.  All sorts of things can be used as long as you are there to help the game along!

What do children learn through play?

They learn about the properties of objects and how they work.  That if you throw something hard, it will go far.  They learn about their own limitations: they may be great on the scooter but not so confident on a bike.  They learn about their environment (stairs and steps) and other places (on a walk to the park).  They learn how to play with other children and how to interact with adults.

Will playing make them better at school?

Many studies have concluded that children that play with their parents are more curious and interested in learning.  Playing is a great way to get them active and interested.  It may also help their social skills and helps develop healthy relationships with other children.

Plus, possibly most importantly, by playing with your children, you are developing and securing your won relationship with them - which is absolutley vital.

So, just get out there and do some ToucanLearn activities, fool around, have a laugh and enjoy these special years when playing can be so much fun for your both!

As election fever grips the UK, you can barely escape the debates raging in the news, but what is the future for the Early Years Foundation Stage framework?  EYFS was created by the Childcare Act 2006, coming into force in September 2008.  If Labour win another term at the coming election, then the EYFS has greatest chance of survival, but if either the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats come to power, there is likely to be fairly major change to the framework.  In the event of a hung parliament, the EYFS could either be sidelined as an issue that isn't worth bringing to the fore, or, depending on the balance of power, it could be an easy issue to tackle whilst more controversial issues are sidelined.

The EYFS has always stirred controversy amongst early years professionals.  Chief argument against it is that it is too prescriptive and creates too much burden on child carers.  The Conservatives were arguing, even before EYFS was mandated, that the proposed framework would stifle the creativity required for children to learn in the early years, and they were critical of the 'box ticking' exercise of the Areas of Learning and Development.

There are also opponents that claim that some of the goals of EYFS are too advanced for the preschool age group that it is aimed at, particularly in its numeracy and literacy objectives.

Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have stated that they will pare down the EYFS.  The Liberal Democrats will scrap the EYFS in its current form and introduce a smaller framework to replace it.  They would also cut back the Department of Children, Schools and Families and replace OFSTED with an Education Standards Authority.

The Conservatives have been less clear about the future of EYFS; whilst there is no doubt in their camp that the EYFS is overly bureacratic and offers the wrong approach to early years education, they have not stated whether they would scrap it altogether or simply reshape it.  Speculation is that they would reduce its regulatory scope, making it more of a guiding framework, but keep something in place.  They do remain committed to Sure Start Children's Centres and propose improving them further.  They will also prioritise tackling the falling population of child carers which they attribute to the over-regulation of early years eductaion.

If Labour wins a further term in power, EYFS is still likely to undergo reform.  As Labour launched their manifesto, Gordon Brown referred to their 'play based early years framework' with no direct mention of EYFS by name.  Whilst many early years practitioners would argue that EYFS is nothing like a play based framework, ToucanLearn's emphasis has always been on learning through play and that is the premise with which we integrated with EYFS.  Wider speculation is that Labour realise they have created too much burden with EYFS and will look to undo some of their change.

We were in contact with the Department for Children, Schools and Families as we adopted EYFS into ToucanLearn and even six months ago we found the department largely paralysed by the knowledge that change was imminent with the election due, regardless of the outcome.  This paralysis has been a criticism of the cyclical nature of set-term politics in this country for a long time - no government department is going to set about major upheaval within a year of an election for fear that an incoming government will change course.

Whatever the outcome of the election, EYFS is likely to undergo some reform.  At ToucanLearn we remain committed to the principle of learning through play - it will take a much more radical paradigm shift in early years education before anyone says that that's not a good way for babies and young children to learn and develop!

It's official - parents are spending three times as much time with their children as they did a generation ago.  Some of the findings concluded by Dr Sullivan and his team at Oxford University inlude:

• Working mothers spend more (and not as previously thought less) time with their children.
• Mothers are still the main carer (which is not surprising) but fathers are doing more childcare than before.
• Fathers spend up to half an hour a day more with their children than in 1975 and do more of the household chores!

The research was carried out by analyzing diaries kept by parents between 1975 and 2000.  The people were then divided into three separate groups: those with no O Levels or GCSEs, those with one or more and those with a higher education qualification, such as a Degree.

When it comes to domestic chores, men do more now than they did and despite the advent of domestic appliances with  "time-saving" claims, both men and women spend more time on domestic activities today than 25 years ago.

The results showed that in 1975 fathers spent a matter of minutes each day with their children on average.  By 2000, this figure is more like 35 minutes.  When it came to mums, in 1975 they spent about 20 minutes with their children and by 2000 it was over an hour.

This goes against the common opinion that suggests because more women are working they actually spend less time with their chidlren.  This could be explained by the fact that parents are more aware of the need and benefits of spending time with their offspring.

This is where ToucanLearn comes in - we wish actively to encourage parents to spend more time with their children; with hundreds of ideas, games and crafts to do with your children, there's no excuse not to play together!   Tell a friend about ToucanLearn and share the fun!

New research has found that one in ten children will be obese in the next five years - what a staggering statistic!  Research carried out at the University of London studied statistics between 1995 and 2007.   The health survey for England provided the data which takes a sample of UK households.

If the trend continues, then researchers predicted that 1 in 10 boys aged between 2-10 will be obese by 2015, and approximately 1 in 9 girls.  In lower income families the statistic was slightly worse. They said  'these increases will affect the lower social classes to a larger extent'.

The research was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health - let's hope the predictions don't become reality.  It's so important to get kids up and moving from an early age.

Children who are overweight at a young age risk greater likelihood of health problems in later life, including diabetes and heart disease.  Children who are more active in their first few years are statistically more likely to maintain an active lifestyle when they are older.

There is so much that parents and carers can do and its one area where you don't need to spend much money.  Going to the local play park, setting off on nature walks round your neighbourhood, heading off the woods and climbing on fallen tree trunks, even walking or scooting to school instead of driving.  Enjoy an active lifestyle with your children and they will benefit for years to come.  Premium Members of ToucanLearn can search for 'Physical Development' activities 'Outdoor' and find lots of fun games and activities to do outside, specifically aimed at the capabilities of their children!

The EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) is a set of guidelines provided by the government to set the standards for the learning, development and care of children. It covers babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers from birth to age 5.

It gives childminders, carers and nurseries guidelines within which they can care for and guide the children. It provides targets for children and a means by which to measure a child's progress.

There are six Areas of Learning and Development defined in the Early Years Foundation Stage. These are as follows:

1. Personal, Social and Emotional Development: This includes among other things how to make a maintain relationships, self-confidence and self-esteem; behaviour and self care and children's sense of community.
2. Communication, Language and Literacy: How children use and develop language to speak, how they think, how they learn letters and soundsm how they learn to read and write.
3. Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: This includes numbers, counting, shapes and calculating.
4. Knowledge and Understanding of the World: How children explore new places and objects; how they design and make things. How they use information and technology to learn; also, time, history and other people's cultures.
5. Physical Development: How children move and use space and equipment, their health and bodily awareness.
6. Creative Development: How children respond to what they see, hear, feel smell and touch; how they use new materials and make new things; dance, music and imaginative play.

Since 2008 all childminders registered in England who look after children must deliver the EYFS and be inspected by OFSTED.  Although childminders are trained professionals, its not restricted to them alone and parents can also learn a great deal from the EYFS and the guidelines it offers.

All of ToucanLearn's activities are linked to the EYFS Areas of Learning and Development which means premium members can search for activities within each area and encourage and entertain their children with appropriate crafts, games and activities.

The EYFS makes it easy for childminders and parents to see what each child should be doing. ToucanLearn gives a practical implementation and a whole lot of fun!

At ToucanLearn we promote a 'learning programme' for children from birth to 5 years, and although we hint at how this is derived in our FAQ, we don't offer an in depth description of the processes we took to devise at our 'programme'  - we'd like to offer that detail here.

At the outset, we examined a number of key texts in child development theory.  Although these are based on science and academic rigour, they propose differences in the understanding of how children learn and develop.  We don't favour a single theory of child development, but instead looked at the practical components and created our own 'scale' based on what different proponents offer.  ToucanLearn is built on many different sources but some of the key sources include work published by The American Academy of Pediatrics, we borrow from the unique longitudanal study still ongoing as Child of Our Time and presented by Professor Robert Winston, and the work of eminent child psychologts such as Dr. Richard Woolfson, Professor Tanya Byron, Professor Linda Pound, Jennie Lindon and other less well known, but no less important, individuals.

Common to most of the developmental literature and sources was the way that they break down 'development' into a number of key areas.  These aren't static, but there are key skill areas examined by child psychologists and practitioners.  We concentrated on four particular areas that were largely common to developmental analyses, and devised our own scale unique to ToucanLearn, but based on the experiences of different proponents.  These areas of development are:-

• Fine motor skills
• Gross motor skills
• Cognitive skills
• Language development

In order to offer this to a broad audience rather than the scientific community, we refer to these as 'Making', 'Moving', 'Thinking' and 'Speaking'.

We created a scale of milestones for each of these four broad areas of development.  We took the first five years of development and created a chart based on age, from day 0 when a baby is born, to day 2,190 when our programme ends (when a child turns 6).  For example, our scale pinpoints the day when a child should be able to pick up an object, when they should be able to clap, when they should be able to understand instructions, tell a story and so on.  Our chart, which we don't publish, has hundreds of milestones across these four broad areas.   Some of these achievements are trivial, others siginifcant, but to a parent or childminder, all of these are significant in the context of their own children.

We then created hundreds of activities aimed at encouraging each developmental milestone, no matter how significant.  We categorised each activity against our derived scale.  Every activity is categorised across all four areas, with a score relating to the age of a child in days, pinpointing the day on which a child should be able to complete the activity.  Each activity has a single overriding focus, and this is the focus that we state for each activity, offering each as a making, moving, learning or language based activity.

Unfortunately for us, not all children develop at the same rate and although many of these milestones are linear in that they will be acquired in a certain order (for example, a child learns to stand before they can walk, and jump before they can hop), our 'programme' has to offer deviation to account for differences in development.  There is also a potential disjoint between developmental theory and real children!  This is where 'feedback' comes in.  We offer the option for every adult participating in ToucanLearn to 'feed back' in our blog area as to whether each activity was too difficult, too easy or just right.  This is a positive feedback mechanism that does two things.

First, we track the progress of each ToucanLearn child along four axes, one for each key development area, and depending on the feedback, we move them up or down each scale.  The scales relate to age, so if an activity aimed at teaching a child to clap is found to be too easy, we increase their 'fine motor' or 'making' score so that we take account of their ability; if it's too hard, we decrease their score.  This ensures that the activities offered to them are appropriate to their capabilities.  At the outset, we offer activities appropriate to their age in days across each of the four skill areas.  Over time and with feedback they are awarded a 'handicap' for each skill area that may be positive or negative.  This accounts for differences in the development of our different children across different skill acquisition.

The second feature of 'feedback' improves the placement of every individual activity.  Our scale derived from developmental literature might have walking or talking in the wrong place, but the collated feedback of each participant pushes the activity backwards or forwards depending on the response.  Over time this will have an averaging effect that refines the position of every activity thus feedback for each individual improves the experience for everyone.

Because our scales are based on age, if a parent registers their children at birth and participates intensively in our programme for a few months, but then goes away for two years and then comes back, the activities presented will still be relevant to the child.  If a childminder registers one child in order to access activities for several children of a similar age, then our programme falls down, because the benefit of individual tracking is lost.  That's not to say that activities won't be broadly relevant, but it won't be possible to drive each child according to their unique abilities.

Our feedback mechanism also allows for our programme to be used for children with special needs or different learning disabilities.  Although it can't be completely accurate for every situation, we believe that the core experience remains relevant for such children.  Their initial participation in our programme needs to adjusted according to their capabilities, and progress may be different to other children, but the linear nature of development across our key areas remains relevant and we can work with parents and carers to ensure that they remain on a suitable path.

Every activity is also rated according to the UK government's Early Years Foundation Stage Areas (EYFS) of Learning and Development.  This information is offered only to Premium Members as an enticement for people to subscribe.  We have to derive enough revenue to continue offering our service because we don't currently receive any governmental or other sponsorship!  EYFS is very much the 'icing' on a programme based on child developmental psychology, anyone participating in ToucanLearn will benefit from the underlying science whilst also being able to fulfil and track their progress through EYFS.

If you're still reading at this stage, then clearly you are interested in the route that we took to bring ToucanLearn to market and we hope that you have understood and agree with the path we have taken.  We conceived our initial ideas early in 2007 and spent over two years researching and developing the service before our formal launch in June 2009.  Every child is different, but we hope that our programme will remain broadly relevent to the majority of participants and whether the science is important to you or not, we hope that we can stimulate an interest in learning and development and foster a strong one to one relationship between every child and their parents and carers regardless!

Observing children forms a fundamental part of the Early Years Foundation Stage, childminders are required to observe children and make notes.  This helps to record each child's progress through EYFS and also helps you to plan ahead and work out what areas of learning to focus on for the medium term.  Key to observing children is simply that - watching what they do without offering any external direction, or offering only minimal interaction.  Childminders are so used to interacting with their wards that it can feel a little strange just stepping away and watching!

Make notes of what you observe; you might choose to do this straight into a diary, or you might prefer to take notes whilst you watch and later write them up more formally.  A written record creates an invaluable resource both for you and to share with parents, or indeed to carers in other settings.

When you undertake your planning, go back though your diaries of observations and work out what areas of learning you need to concentrate on over the coming weeks.  Compare your notes over time to ensure that your children are progressing.  Although keeping a diary seems a big chore, if you write it regularly you will quickly find that it takes very little time and becomes part of your routine.  A number of ToucanLearn members are using their private blog spaces to record their observations and this is an area that we intend to improve to facilitate better records for professional childminders and diligent parents alike!

In the first few months following birth, your baby is experiencing the world through its senses, and it is those experiences that help form connections inside the brain and these connections that shape the individual mind of your baby.  At birth, a baby is barely able to see but they have an acute sense of smell.  At three days old they can recognise the smell of their mother's breast milk and the odour of their parents, yet they can still see only centimetres in front of them.  They have an innate ability to recognise faces and are attracted to faces close by.

By three months their brains have developed considerably and they are able to control themselves better - they can choose where to look rather than being fixated on moving objects nearby.  They might move their arms and legs seemingly randomly, but this is helping them to build up muscles, an essential component on the way to being able to roll, crawl and later walk.  This movement allows them to interact with their physical surroundings and this intensifies the rate at which the brain develops as it is exposed to new experiences.  Research shows that babies who are denied the opportunity to interact physically with their surroundings develop at a slower rate so it is particularly important to work with babies suffering physical or mental disability to ensure that they can develop as best they can.

Interacting with your baby is especially important even during these early months - try to spend time with your newborn baby stimulating them.  Stimulate their vision by exposing them to high contrast patterns and making movement in front of them; stimulate their hearing by playing background sounds and music, and rattling toys in front of them.  Stimulate their sense of feel by touching stroking them and letting them hold your fingers and baby toys.

It would be easy to ignore your newborn baby and leave them lying in another room for their first few months while you get on with the chores you have to do, but the more time you can spend with your baby, the more rewarding for both you and your little one!

Don't forget that here at ToucanLearn we have activities suitable from birth onwards.  Our early activities are simple and aimed at helping to stimulate early development in your child.  All our activities link into the Early Years Foundation Stage Areas of Learning and Development, so you can monitor that you are giving your baby a broad range of activities even at this early stage.