Children’s Matters Count at Baby Bird Productions’ Egg Blog

INTRODUCTION AND INTUITION

Are you and your children moving house soon ? If you’re moving to a new town or a new region, it can be rough on your children as they may feel uprooted and disoriented. Your children lose the comfort and security of the world they know - from their private spaces to their more public places: their bedroom, their house, their yard, their neighborhood, their school, their local park, their town and so forth. Worst of all, they lose regular contact with their friends and, possibly, aunts, uncles and cousins in the bargain. In addition, they suddenly find themselves the “new kids in town,” trying to find their niche in a new community.

This article offers some ideas that you might try in order to ease the transition for your children. They’re all just common sense, but a little advance planning can go a long way.

PREPARATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

First of all, let your children know the reasons for the move: why you MUST move or why you WANT TO move: for a new job or a company transfer ? further schooling or job training ? for financial reasons ? to be nearer to your own parents or other family members ? due to a divorce or remarriage ? for health reasons ? for a new climate ? for a change of scene or simply for the adventure of it ? The less of a mystery it is, the more likely your children are to understand the situation and to cooperate.

Try to get your children excited about the move - the more interested they are, the more they’ll look forward to it and the less they’ll dwell on the wistful aspects of leaving their old home and familiar surroundings. Encourage them to research the new locale - its topography and climate, local history and landmarks. What interseting past events occurred in your new town or state or region ? What intersting places are there to see in the new area: state or national parks ? historical buildings ? unfamiliar birds and wildlife ? local festivals ? regional music styles ? fascinating local customs ? The bigger the move, the more there will be that’s different and exciting. For example, when I once moved from the Northeastern United states to the Southeast, I found a fascinating and exotically unfamiliar world of azaleas, swamps, alligators and clog dancing.

Make the research into a game: utilizing Internet, library books, tourist office brochures and other information sources and encouraging your children to draw up lists of the types of things that will be new, or comparisons between their old and new locales. Have them list sites they’d like to visit and new foods and activities they’d like to try. They could list all of the positive points about the move, the advantages of the new climate, and so on.

Big Changes at Baby Bird Productions !

The reason that we haven’t posted recently is that we have been hard at work merging our two websites into one better than ever site ! We have combined our family clothing and gift site with our children’s stories and free resources site. The result is the new www.babybirdproductions.com.

On our site you can find all sorts of great things for kids, such as baby clothes and children’s clothing (plus matching clothing for adults), all decorated with fun colorful pictures. We also have gift items such as mugs, Teddy bears, mouse pads, and totebags with the same bright designs on them. Parents and children can dress alike or mix and match items to create unique gift sets. Many of our designs come from our own original animated and still picture children’s stories, which are available as CDs and as downloads. Of course, we still have plenty of free games and activities for children, and informational pages for parents and teachers, to help them help children reach their potential.

In addition to the technical work involved in making our two sites into one big site, we have also been redesigning the look of our pages to make them more cheerful than ever. Pages related to our products have a beige and salmon color scheme, while our free content retains its sunny yellow pages.

We hope you’ll visit us at Baby Bird Productions and have some fun exploring the different parts of our site. Happy New Year !

During the rest of November, and the Christmas season, we are going to take a break from our usual discussion of topics related to children’s stories, fairy tales, children’s reading skills, etc. Instead, we are going to be highlighting various products from our shop for kids and parents.

We are excited that our new ” A, B, Tees ” alphabet clothing and gifts product line has been reviewed by FamilyCorner.com in their Consumer Corner. This week you can see the review at
FamilyCorner.com Consumer’s Corner After that, the review will be archived at FamilyCorner.com Consumer’s Corner

Or you can read the review right here:

Alphabet Tote Bag

According to the U.S. Department of Education, if children begin kindergarten already knowing the names of many letters, they will master reading more easily. The recognition of letters, knowing their names, and associating letter combinations with the sounds of spoken words are precursors to the development of reading skills.

At Baby Bird Productions childsafe online shop there are now colorful T-shirts, sweatshirts and gifts that can actually help young children learn their ABCs and learn to spell simple words in novel ways. These “A, B, Tees” offer several alphabets, including an animals alphabet and an alphabet of healthy foods. Most clothing comes with fully illustrated alphabets on the front and matching word lists on the back. They’re fun for children to wear and especially useful for parents to wear, too. Every time children look at mom or dad they’ll see the alphabet and reinforce their ABCs effortlessly. This unusual approach to the alphabet lends itself to all sorts of spelling and reading games, as well, and the Baby Bird shop features many spelling game suggestions.

Visit the A, B, TEES: ALPHABET CLOTHING & GIFTS section of our shop.

OOPS ! Sorry about that last post. Here’s the post again with the images.

Just in time for Christmas, but fun all year long, our new messenger bags designed just for kids. We have messenger bags to suit every child’s interest - from a colony of cats, to three-headed dragons, little red riding hood, goldilocks, and more.

Here are just a few of the colorful pictures that appear on our new messenger bags for kids. These messenger bags can be found in the MESSENGER BAGS section of the Baby Bird Productions Clothing and Gifts Shop.

All of our cheerful messenger bags are ON SALE NOW FOR CHRISTMAS

New babies cry out for new baby gifts. Here are the most recently added colorful pictures that we’ve put onto baby bibs, baby creepers, baby and toddler T-shirts and adorable baby gifts. Mix and match our sweet new baby designs to create beautiful and unique new baby gift sets. Baby Bird Productions Children’s Clothing & Gifts: New baby Clothes & Baby Gifts

Gradually fairy tales, with their fanciful notions such as fairy godmothers and wish granting, became the domain of children, but not without controversy. Many people in the Victorian era believed that children should only be given stories that reinforced religious and moral values and that any element of fantasy was a dangerous thing for young minds.

The original Grimm versions of some well-known tales contain many disturbing and violent elements that might shock today’s readers - childeating mothers-in-law and violent deaths among other things. As fairy tales have evolved from entertainment for adults to entertainment for children they have been modified quite a bit to suit modern sensibilities. Even today, if you’re concerned about exposing your young children to frightening concepts and scenes, it is a good idea to read fairy tale texts yourself before reading them to your children. You may come across
a collection of fairy tales that you think you know and yet be in for some unpleasant surprises, depending on the source material used for the story.

If you read the ingredient label on a food product before adding that food to your child’s diet, it makes equal sense to read a sampling of stories in a collection of fairy tales before letting those stories into your children’s minds and hearts.

Fairy tales were not put down in writing until the 1600s, when Charles Perrault published a collection in France. Literature that was written especially for children did not appear until the mid-1700s, and these were never fairy tales. Instead they were stories of religious and other instruction. The Brothers Grimm, who have provided generations of Europeans and Americans with many of their best-loved fairy tales, originally collected these tales in Germany in the 1800s. The Grimm Brothers were a part of a broader nationalistic movement in Europe which called for the preservation of one’s own cultural heritage, and they had their counterparts in, for example, Scandinavia and England.

Halloween gifts can add even more fun to the Halloween holiday for all the ghouls and ghosts, and girls and boys in your life.

Halloween is approaching fast, so if you’d like to give someone a Halloween gift for an extra thrill this Halloween, check out our brand new Halloween Havoc” shop, where you’ll find fun Halloween gifts for all ages. There are canvas trick or treat bags decorated with colorful witches, headless horsemen, and jack-o-lanterns. We also have matching Halloween T-shirts and sweatshirts for kids and adults. We even have Halloween baby and toddler clothing adorned with bright jack-o-lanterns, plus Halloween gift mugs and more.

If your children like silly monster stories, we have those, too. There’s our funny adventure story “My Day in the Haunted House” available on our children’s stories CD volume 3 and the animated “Creatures in the Cupboard” monster alphabet on children’s story CD volume 4. You can find them both in our Children’s Stories CD shop.

We at Baby Bird Productions wish a very happy Halloween to everyone in your house !

Fairy tales and folk tales grew out of everyday human experience and emotions. Long before the average person had the opportunity to learn how to read, oral storytelling was a means of sharing and reinforcing cultural values, imparting moral lessons, and promoting social cohesion. Storytelling was also a great form of entertainment- the more exciting the story, the more rapt attention the story commanded from its audience, and although children might be listening, these stories were not toned down for young ears.

Modern forms of entertainment such as films and video are dependent upon electricity, but throughout most of history people have relied on simpler, more personal means of entertaining themselves. Sitting around the hearth fire at night people invented and shared stories, they repeated those they’d heard, and the more creative individuals may have added embellishments or more dramatic storytelling techniques. Storytelling must be one of the oldest and purest forms of human entertainment.

In today’s versions of fairy tales the hero and /or heroine invariably ends up finding happiness by the end of the story. This idea that a fairy tale should have a happy ending is a relatively new one. Earlier versions of many of the fairy tales that we know today often had unhappy and even violent endings. In fact, violence and brutality were common in the versions of fairy tales that were widely known in centuries past and many of these tales have been considerably toned down for modern audiences. For example, in the Grimm Brothers’ version of Snow White, from the 19th century, the wicked queen has to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies.

Why were fairy tales often violent, sometimes graphically so ? As we said earlier, fairy tales were not originally intended to be for children. They evolved as a means of passing on cultural values and standards of behavior from one generation to another. Violence was much more common in everyday life centuries ago and the idea that violence in entertainment could have harmful psychological effects did not exist until recent times.