Sunday, 7 February 2010

A BIT OF PLANNING

VALUES

Yesterday we finished off M. photo album. I printed some more pictures of other friends and family members to complete the album...still someone missing but we will sort this out next time we fly back home!


As last time she added some stickers and she tried to remember episodes to connect to each person...funny what she remembers!




SCIENCE

Today, during my 30 minutes workout on the stepper (!), I was thinking about a project I could do with M. about animals. Yesterday evening we caught the last part of "Life" on BBC FOUR. She was enjoying it very much and she stayed focus till the end. She was particularly impressed by the scene where an ostrich is put down by three cheetahs, she was especially curious about the ostrich. This morning she brought me her animals book where she had found a picture of an ostrich. She didn't really care about that animal before, but now she was quite keen on showing it to me and tell me all about what happened on TV.


I took the laptop and started searching for some videos on ostrich and I found a couple which she enjoyed watching.

So I thought that it would be nice to make her colour in a print out for each animal she is curious about, and also find something else to colour in about the animal, for example a huge egg for the ostrich and a butterfly for the caterpillar. I searched a bit on the Internet and I found this very helpful site http://www.first-school.ws/ where there are lots of educational resources for toddlers, and many colour in sheets of basically anything.
Tomorrow will be the first day of our animal project, which will be dictated by M.'s interests of the moment. I will anyway start from her previous curiosities which her bees,caterpillars, dinosaurs and now ostriches and chitahas.

Something that she definitely fancies is playing with her tea set and water. She is drink so much of her "tea" that I have to change her nappy so much often and sometimes I have to change her trousers and top too....
To give it an additional educational edge, today I introduced a real tea bag to her water, and then we observed how the water changes colour. This made me think that it would be a good idea to show her how water changes colour when we add some food colouring to it, I may even try to put a sugar cube in the water and show her how this also take up the colour.


COLOURS

I have also thought that I must re-enforce her colours knowledge a bit more. For now all the colours are named "blue"!
This afternoon I set out an activity in which she should have painted some pasta of the colours we have experimented before, so that, once dry, she could play with her pots and pans and her colourful pasta, this will help her see the colours during her playtime and hopefully learn the names. In reality she didn't find the business of paint the pasta something that she fancied. She just painted 2 or 3 shapes and left the table. I then finished the job to ensure the good outcome of my experiment. Will keep updating on the progress.
5 SENSES
I also elaborated something that it was in my mind for a long time but that I didn't have the time to think it through. I would like to make a kind of "5 senses laboratory", something I remember from my montessori nursery days. For the time being I will work on the sense of touch and smell. I thought to find something smooth, rough, spiny and soft and try to encase it or frame it. Then I need herbs and spices to work with for the sense of smell; probably put them in separated boxes and make holes in their lids. All of this will then be put in a big storage container that she can access whenever she likes.
I will to start the laboratory next week.

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